William Butler Yeats Quotes
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He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer.
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Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil
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All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it
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I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me
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I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood; And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes.
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How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
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Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.
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I have nothing but the embittered sun; Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun.
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All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.
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And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
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Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?
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Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
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The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told; I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart.
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Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
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Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.
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Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
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What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?
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Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
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Everything in nature is resurrection.
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For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,”Here is the fiddler of Dooney!” / And dance like a wave of the sea.
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I would that there was nothing in the world But my beloved that night and day had perished, And all that is and all that is to be, All that is not the meeting of our lips.
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I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.
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I have nothing more to give you than my heart. Spanish saying Hearts are not to be had as a gift hearts are to be earned.
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Though pedantry denies, It's plain the Bible means That Solomon grew wise While talking with his queens.