William Butler Yeats Quotes
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When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.
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Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye. What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher, Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.
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I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember
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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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But stories that live longest Are sung above the glass, And Parnell loved his country And Parnell loved his lass.
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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
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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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What do we know but that we face one another in this place?
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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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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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Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
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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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The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
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And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
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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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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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Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.
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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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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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And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.
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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.
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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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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 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.