William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The old priest Peter Gilligan Was weary night and day; For half his flock were in their beds, Or under green sods lay.
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Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.
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A drunkard is a dead man And all dead men are drunk.
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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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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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A spot whereon the founders lived and died Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees, Or gardens rich in memory glorified Marriages, alliances, and families, And every bride's ambition satisfied.
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I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay
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now I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
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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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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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Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.
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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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When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave on the sea.
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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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A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade, Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out. It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
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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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Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.
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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?"