William Butler Yeats Quotes

Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

If soul my look and body touch, Which is the more blest?

Come let us mock at the great That had such burdens on the mind And toiled so hard and late To leave some monument behind, Nor thought of the leveling wind.

That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.

When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

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.

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.

Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?

It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.

While they danced they came over them the weariness with the world, the melancholy, the pity one for the other, which is the exultation of love.

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree. In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Bid imagination run / Much on the Great Questioner; / What He can question, what if questioned I / Can with a fitting confidence reply.

An intellectual hate is the worst.

When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

When two close kindred meet What better than call a dance?.

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?

The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.

Love comes in at the eye.

Time can but make her beauty over again.

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.

Many ingenious lovely things are gone / That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.

We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.

For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,”Here is the fiddler of Dooney!” / And dance like a wave of the sea.

Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.

Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.

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.

THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea

I pray-for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.

Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room.

All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.

Education is not filling

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance How can we know the dancer from the dance?