William Butler Yeats Quotes
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It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat.
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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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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 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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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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We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.
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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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A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard A voice singing on a May Eve like this, And followed half awake and half asleep, Until she came into the Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue. And she is still there, busied with a dance Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood, Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top.
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Come let us mock at the good That fancied goodness might be gay, And sick of solitude Might proclaim a holiday: Wind shrieked and where are they?
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Man has created death.
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Hammer your thoughts into unity.
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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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I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.
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I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes But when this soul, its body off Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows.
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Education is not filling
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What can be explained is not poetry.
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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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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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I thought no more was needed Youth to prolong Than dumb-bell and foil To keep the body young. O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?
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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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What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.
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The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
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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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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.