William Butler Yeats quotes - page 13

When you are old and gray 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. (William Butler Yeats)
When two close kindred meetWhat better than call a dance. View quote
William Butler Yeats
I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. . . . The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. View quote
William Butler Yeats
For such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend. r. View quote
William Butler Yeats
An Irish Airman foresees his Death 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, My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. View quote
William Butler Yeats
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds. View quote
William Butler Yeats
I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world, and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Style, personality -- deliberately adopted and therefore a mask -- is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers. (William Butler Yeats)
And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O Never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart. View quote
William Butler Yeats
I bear a burden that might well tryMen that do all by rule,And what can IThat am a wandering-witted foolBut pray to God that He easeMy great responsibilities. View quote
William Butler Yeats
No man has ever lived that had enough Of children's gratitude or woman's love. View quote
William Butler Yeats
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. View quote
William Butler Yeats
I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree. View quote
William Butler Yeats
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong. View quote
William Butler Yeats
The unpurged images of day recede The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Speech after long silence it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead ... That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song Bodily decrepitude is wisdom young We loved each other and were ignorant. (William Butler Yeats)
Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul. View quote
William Butler Yeats
The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away. View quote
William Butler Yeats
We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936. View quote
William Butler Yeats
Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering. View quote
William Butler Yeats