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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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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One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a mans eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious,of many things we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.
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And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
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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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I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem.
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Education is not filling
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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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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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For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
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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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It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike.
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A drunkard is a dead man And all dead men are drunk.
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I am haunted by numberless islands, many a Danaan shore, Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
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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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I bear a burden that might well try Men that do all by rule, And what can I That am a wandering-witted fool But pray to God that He ease My great responsibilities?
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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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What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.
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The winds that awakened the stars Are blowing through my blood.
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Give to these children, new from the world, Rest far from men. Is anything better, anything better? Tell us it then.
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Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
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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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Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
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What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms?