Top 594 Quotes & Sayings by William Butler Yeats - Page 5

O sweet everlasting Voices, be still; Go to the guards of the heavenly fold And bid them wander obeying your will, Flame under flame, till Time be no more.

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

Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire, With your harmonious choir Encircle her I love and sing her into peace, That my old care may cease.

I have nothing more to give you than my heart. Spanish saying Hearts are not to be had as a gift hearts are to be earned.

I long for truth, and yet I cannot stay from that My better self disowns, For a man's attention Brings such satisfaction To the craving in my bones.

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

A tree there is that from its topmost bough Is half all glittering flame and half all green Abounding foliage moistened with the dew; And half is half and yet is all the scene; And half and half consume what they renew.

Ah, let us kiss each other's eyes,/And laugh our love away.

The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam, Our arms are waving, our lips are apart.

We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love

True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.

For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

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

Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

O heart, we are old; The living beauty is for younger men: We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

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.

If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf

Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.

A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.

Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing. My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.

When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.

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

When all is said and done, how do we know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey.

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

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.

We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.

Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.

For wisdom is the property of the dead, A something incompatible with life; and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood, A property of the living; but no stain Can come upon the visage of the moon When it has looked in glory from a cloud.

I knew that I had seen, had seen at last That girl my unremembering nights hold fast Or else my dreams that fly If I should rub an eye, And yet in flying fling into my meat A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat.

Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted, Their heads being turned with praise and flattery; And that is why their lovers are afraid To tell them a plain story.

Him who trembles before the flame and the flood, And the winds that blow through the starry ways, Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood Cover over and hide, for he has no part With the lonely, majestical multitude.

Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.

All the stream that's roaring by Came out of a needle's eye.

I had this thought a while ago, "My darling cannot understand What I have done, or what would do In this blind bitter land." And I grew weary of the sun

Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns? I have been changed to a hound with one red ear; I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns.

I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow; And then I must scrub and bake and sweep Till the stars are beginning to blink and peep; And the young lie long and dream in their bed.

The Muse is mute when public men Applaud a modern throne.

What do we know but that we face one another in this place?

My chair was nearest to the fire In every company That talked of love or politics, Ere Time transfigured me.

There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.

Before The World Was Made 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. What if I look upon a man as though on my beloved, and my blood be cold the while and my heart unmoved? Why should he think me cruel or that he is betrayed? I'd have him love the thing that was before the world was made.

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?

When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.

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?

He Who is wrapped in purple robes, With planets in His care, Had pity on the least of things Asleep upon a chair.

Words alone are certain good.

My soul had found All happiness in its own cause or ground. Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot Godhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot Those amorous cries that out of quiet come And must the common round of day resume.

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

It's certain there are trout somewhere - And maybe I shall take a trout - but I do not seem to care.

We are fastened to a dying animal.

O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.

The problem wiv some blokes is that wen they ain't drunk, they're sober.

His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

I sat on cushioned otter-skin: My word was law from Ith to Emain, And shook at Invar Amargin The hearts of the world-troubling seamen, And drove tumult and war away.

I Sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again.

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.

But bear in mind your lover's wage Is what your looking-glass can show, And that he will turn green with rage At all that is not pictured there.

Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind, That loved his learning better than mankind, Though courteous to the worst; much falling he Brooded upon sanctity.

Cuchulain stirred, Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard The cars of battle and his own name cried; And fought with the invulnerable tide.