William Butler Yeats Quotes
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All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.
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What the world's million lips are searching for, must be substantial somewhere.
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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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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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How could passion run so deep Had I never thought That the crime of being born Blackens all our lot?
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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
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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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Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
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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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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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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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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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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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People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
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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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Myself I must remake.
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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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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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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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There is only one romance the Soul's.
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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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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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for never yet Has lover lived, but longed to wive Like them that are no more alive.