William Butler Yeats Quotes
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The women take so little stock In what I do or say They'd sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray.
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Earth in beauty dressed Awaits returning spring. All true love must die, Alter at the best Into some lesser thing. Prove that I lie.
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As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead, For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said. Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind.
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Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
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When two close kindred meet What better than call a dance?.
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The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.
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I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.
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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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That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There's many a one shall find out all heartache On finding that her voice is sweet and low Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know- Although they do not talk of it at school - That we must labor to be beautiful.
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Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. I thirst for accusation. All that was sung. All that was said in Ireland is a lie Breed out of the contagion of the throng, Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.
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Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.
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A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more?
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Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
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But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
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Come let us mock at the good That fancied goodness might be gay, And sick of solitude Might proclaim a holiday: Wind shrieked and where are they?
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While they danced they came over them the weariness with the world, the melancholy, the pity one for the other, which is the exultation of love.
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When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.
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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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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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Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.
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Man's life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality.
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Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room.
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Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.
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Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.