William Butler Yeats Quotes
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All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
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The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
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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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We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936
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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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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.
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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
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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.
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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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Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by
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And God would bid His warfare cease, Saying all things were well; And softly make a rosy peace, A peace of Heaven with Hell.
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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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Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.
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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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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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Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told your character: Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.
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Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
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When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.
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And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
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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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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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When You Are Old" WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
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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.