William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.
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I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes But when this soul, its body off Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows.
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All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.
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People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
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It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.
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An Irish Airman foresees his Death I Know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate Those that I guard I do not love, My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death.
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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
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Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told your character: Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.
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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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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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Let the new faces play what tricks they will In the old rooms; night can outbalance day, Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, The living seem more shadowy than they.
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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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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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One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain. Because the mountain grass Cannot keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain.
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There is only one romance the Soul's.
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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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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 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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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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Myself I must remake.
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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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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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Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.
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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.