William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by
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All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.
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It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.
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Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.
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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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Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.
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What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! Wine shall run thick to the end, Bread taste sour.
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I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
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The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it.
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All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.
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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.
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Between extremities Man runs his course; A brand, or flaming breath, Comes to destroy All those antinomies Of day and night.
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If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf
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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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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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I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown.
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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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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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Education is not filling
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A drunkard is a dead man And all dead men are drunk.
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And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
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When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.
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You ask what I have found and far and wide I go, Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew, The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay, And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen where are they?