William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
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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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Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while.
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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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Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.
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When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.
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Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.
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Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.
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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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The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.
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The Mask "Put off that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes." "O no, my dear, you make so bold To find if hearts be wild and wise, And yet not cold." "I would but find what's there to find, Love or deceit." "It was the mask engaged your mind, And after set your heart to beat, Not what's behind." "But lest you are my enemy, I must enquire." "O no, my dear, let all that be, What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me?"
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All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.
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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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While Michael Angelo's Sistine roof, His "Morning" and his "Night" disclose How sinew that has been pulled tight, Or it may be loosened in repose, Can rule by supernatural right Yet be but sinew.
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One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a mans eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious,of many things we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.
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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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From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.
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Brown Penny I WHISPERED, 'I am too young,' And then, 'I am old enough'; Wherefore I threw a penny To find out if I might love. 'Go and love, go and love, young man, If the lady be young and fair.' Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, I am looped in the loops of her hair. O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon. Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon.
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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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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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Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.
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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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Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.