William Butler Yeats Quotes
-
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.
-
All hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will
-
I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember
-
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.
-
There is another world, but it is in this one.
-
O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet.
-
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.
-
for never yet Has lover lived, but longed to wive Like them that are no more alive.
-
Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
-
The old priest Peter Gilligan Was weary night and day; For half his flock were in their beds, Or under green sods lay.
-
No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.
-
And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
-
All the stream that's roaring by Came out of a needle's eye.
-
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.
-
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.
-
How could passion run so deep Had I never thought That the crime of being born Blackens all our lot?
-
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.
-
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.
-
We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.
-
Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
-
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.
-
Hammer your thoughts into unity.
-
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.
-
I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.