William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
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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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Boughs have their fruit and blossom At all times of the year; Rivers are running over With red beer and brown beer.
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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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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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How could passion run so deep Had I never thought That the crime of being born Blackens all our lot?
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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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What the world's million lips are searching for, must be substantial somewhere.
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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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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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Bid imagination run / Much on the Great Questioner; / What He can question, what if questioned I / Can with a fitting confidence reply.
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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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We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.
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Give to these children, new from the world, Rest far from men. Is anything better, anything better? Tell us it then.
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The chief imagination of Christendom, Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself That he has made that hollow face of his More plain to the mind's eye than any face But that of Christ.
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All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.
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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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Why should I seek for love or study it? It is of God and passes human wit; I study hatred with great diligence, For that's a passion in my own control, A sort of besom that can clear the soul Of everything that is not mind or sense.
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Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.
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Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.
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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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I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away... and the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even spoken to them.
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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.