William Butler Yeats Quotes

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams

No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.

It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline.

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations-at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.

I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self.

What shall I do with this absurdity- O heart, O troubled heart-this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible.

The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.

All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.

Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.

Now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Words alone are certain good.

The pain others give passes away in their later kindness, but that of our own blunders, especially when they hurt our vanity, never passes away

For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.

Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.

I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

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.

The winds that awakened the stars Are blowing through my blood.

The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.

Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.

The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.

Oh, Love is the crooked thing, there is nobody wise enough to find out all that is in it, for he will be thinking about love til the stars run away and the shadows eaten the moon.

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things; or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

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.

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.

I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There's many a one shall find out all heartache On finding that her voice is sweet and low Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know- Although they do not talk of it at school - That we must labor to be beautiful.

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.

My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.

I whispered, 'I am too young,' and then, 'I am old enough'; wherefore I threw a penny to find out if I might love.

The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.

Everything in nature is resurrection.

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember

Who mocks at music mocks at love.

Everything we look upon is blest.

Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk

All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake.

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.

What shall I do for pretty girls Now my old bawd is dead?

Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun.

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.

Nothing that we love overmuch Is ponderable to our touch.