William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
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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 am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.
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Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?
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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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I had a chair at every hearth, When no one turned to see, With 'Look at that old fellow there, 'And who may he be?
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Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room.
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Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
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Man has created death.
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From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.
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What do we know but that we face one another in this place?
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I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.
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It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat.
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The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.
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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 man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.
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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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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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The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.
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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?
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We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love
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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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Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
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I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.