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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The old priest Peter Gilligan Was weary night and day; For half his flock were in their beds, Or under green sods lay.
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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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The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
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Thought is a garment and the soul's a bride That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide: Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.
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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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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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What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.
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A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote. A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat. So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote.
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I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English.
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We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.
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No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.
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I know of the leafy paths that the witches take Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool, And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake.
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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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A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard A voice singing on a May Eve like this, And followed half awake and half asleep, Until she came into the Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue. And she is still there, busied with a dance Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood, Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top.
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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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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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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 explained is not poetry.
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And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
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Hammer your thoughts into unity.
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Education is not filling
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And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
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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.