William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.
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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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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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The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
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Laughter not time destroyed my voice And put that crack in it, And when the moon's pot-bellied I get a laughing fit.
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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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My wretched dragon is perplexed.
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Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
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Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.
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And learn that the best thing is To change my loves while dancing And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
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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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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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What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.
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I, too, await The hour of thy great wind of love and hate. When shall the stars be blown about the sky, Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?
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I sat on cushioned otter-skin: My word was law from Ith to Emain, And shook at Invar Amargin The hearts of the world-troubling seamen, And drove tumult and war away.
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And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.
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And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
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Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.
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rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.
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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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Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
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But stories that live longest Are sung above the glass, And Parnell loved his country And Parnell loved his lass.