William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
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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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All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.
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rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.
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Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire, With your harmonious choir Encircle her I love and sing her into peace, That my old care may cease.
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Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye. What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher, Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.
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How could passion run so deep Had I never thought That the crime of being born Blackens all our lot?
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There is no release In a bodkin or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's dirty slate.
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to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief.
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The chief imagination of Christendom, Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself That he has made that hollow face of his More plain to the mind's eye than any face But that of Christ.
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Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
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My chair was nearest to the fire In every company That talked of love or politics, Ere Time transfigured me.
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That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations-at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.
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somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
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The women that I picked spoke sweet and low And yet gave tongue. "Hound voices" were they all.
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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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Hammer your thoughts into unity.
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I know, although when looks meet I tremble to the bone, The more I leave the door unlatched The sooner love is gone.
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The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.
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Thought is a garment and the soul's a bride That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide: Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.
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Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.
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But stories that live longest Are sung above the glass, And Parnell loved his country And Parnell loved his lass.
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His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
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We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.