William Butler Yeats Quotes
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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
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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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Come swish around my pretty punk And keep me dancing still That I may stay a sober man Although I drink my fill.
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Hammer your thoughts into unity.
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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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Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.
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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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We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
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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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to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief.
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for never yet Has lover lived, but longed to wive Like them that are no more alive.
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rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.
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What do we know but that we face one another in this place?
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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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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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What the world's million lips are searching for, must be substantial somewhere.
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All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
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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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All the stream that's roaring by Came out of a needle's eye.
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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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I bear a burden that might well try Men that do all by rule, And what can I That am a wandering-witted fool But pray to God that He ease My great responsibilities?
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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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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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Myself I must remake.