William Butler Yeats Quotes

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

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.

It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat.

There is only one romance the Soul's.

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.

God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.

Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.

Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances, Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And is anxious in its sleep. . . .

Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Wine enters through the mouth, Love, the eyes. I raise the glass to my mouth, I look at you, I sigh.

You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.

How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there's a politician That has read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!

Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.

Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.

People are responsible for their opinions, but Providence is responsible for their morals.

Myself I must remake.

Where there is nothing, there is God.

The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.

I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

What can be explained is not poetry.

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.

Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

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.

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.

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.

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

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.

You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?

On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

A man in his own secret meditation / Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / In art or politics.

Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!

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.

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with metry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee.

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.