William Butler Yeats Quotes
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On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand lifted up that blest; And right between these two a girl at play That, it may be, had danced her life away.
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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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In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.
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Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.
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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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Everything in nature is resurrection.
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My wretched dragon is perplexed.
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I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.
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Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul
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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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What do we know but that we face one another in this place?
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How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
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To sit beside the board and drink good wine And watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire And feel content and wisdom in your heart, This is the best of life; when we are young We long to tread a way none trod before, But find the excellent old way through love And through the care of children to the hour Forbidding Fate and Time and Change goodbye.
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I have no question: It is enough, I know what fixed the station Of star and cloud. And knowing all, I cry. . . .
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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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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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... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.
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By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.
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We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.
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Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.
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May we two stand, When we are dead, beyond the setting suns, A little from other shades apart, With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.
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We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love
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I had a chair at every hearth, When no one turned to see, With 'Look at that old fellow there, 'And who may he be?
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Though pedantry denies, It's plain the Bible means That Solomon grew wise While talking with his queens.