William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.
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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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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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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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Hammer your thoughts into unity.
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And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.
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Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.
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What do we know but that we face one another in this place?
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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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Education is not filling
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The women take so little stock In what I do or say They'd sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray.
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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
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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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What can be explained is not poetry.
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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 Mask "Put off that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes." "O no, my dear, you make so bold To find if hearts be wild and wise, And yet not cold." "I would but find what's there to find, Love or deceit." "It was the mask engaged your mind, And after set your heart to beat, Not what's behind." "But lest you are my enemy, I must enquire." "O no, my dear, let all that be, What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me?"
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All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.
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Before The World Was Made If I make the lashes dark and the eyes more bright and the lips more scarlet, or ask if all be right from mirror after mirror, no vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had before the world was made. What if I look upon a man as though on my beloved, and my blood be cold the while and my heart unmoved? Why should he think me cruel or that he is betrayed? I'd have him love the thing that was before the world was made.
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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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An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?
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I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember
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Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while.
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So long as all is ordered for attack, and that alone, leaders will instinctively increase the number of enemies that they may give their followers something to do.