William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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Though logic-choppers rule the town, And every man and maid and boy Has marked a distant object down, An aimless joy is a pure joy.
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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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Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.
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Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.
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What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms?
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All the stream that's roaring by Came out of a needle's eye.
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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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rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.
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But stories that live longest Are sung above the glass, And Parnell loved his country And Parnell loved his lass.
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I--though heart might find relief Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief What seems most welcome in the tomb--play a predestined part. Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
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O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet.
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Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.
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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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Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
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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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Because of something told under the famished horn Of the hunter's moon, that hung between the night and the day, To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay, Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.
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Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
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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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I had a chair at every hearth, When no one turned to see, With 'Look at that old fellow there, 'And who may he be?
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Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.
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Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
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The falcon cannot hear the falconer
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There where the course is, Delight makes all of the one mind, The riders upon the galloping horses, The crowd that closes in behind.