Quotes by William Butler Yeats

One man loved the pilgrim soul in you and loved the sorrows of your changing face.

So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blessed by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.

The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober.

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand.

It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.

An old man's eagle mind.

The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!

We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity.

Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all.

All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbor knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

The common breeds the common,
A lout begets a lout,
So when I take on half a score
I knock their heads about.

Man has created death.

The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

They must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened from looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a girl's heart.

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

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.

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

Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney
Folk dance like a wave on the sea.

I have nothing but the embittered sun;
Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,
And now that I have come to fifty years
I must endure the timid sun.

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

It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.

We have to do so much, especially in my own country, that our minds gradually cease to be creative, and yet we cannot help it. If our life was a continual Warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers.

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

For how can you compete Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbour's eyes?

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.

I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
Those undreamt accidents that have made me
Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
Being but a part of ancient ceremony
Notorious, till all my priceless things
Are but a post the passing dogs defile.

Earth in beauty dressed
Awaits returning spring.
All true love must die,
Alter at the best
Into some lesser thing.
Prove that I lie.

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

Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveler; he Served human liberty.

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves Had blotted out man's image and his cry.

It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

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

What can I but enumerate old themes?

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

It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought -- asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.

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

I would have touched it like a child But knew my finger could but have touched Cold stone and water. I grew wild, Even accusing heaven because It had set down among its laws: Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch.

Nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?

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

The Father and His angelic hierarchy
That made the magnitude and glory there
Stood in the circuit of a needle's eye.

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?

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.

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

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay.

The old priest Peter Gilligan
Was weary night and day;
For half his flock were in their beds,
Or under green sods lay.

How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?

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.

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

Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath,
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night.

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

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.

So long as all is ordered for attack, and that alone, leaders will instinctively increase the number of enemies that they may give their followers something to do.

One should say before sleeping: I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knee and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.

Time can but make it easier to be wise Though now it seems impossible, and so All that you need is patience.

Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.

I broke my heart in two
So hard I struck.
What matter? for I know
That out of rock,
Out of a desolate source,
Love leaps upon its course.

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.

Though logic-choppers rule the town,
And every man and maid and boy
Has marked a distant object down,
An aimless joy is a pure joy.

What if I bade you leave
The cavern of the mind?
There's better exercise
In the sunlight and wind.

What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember.

I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Chaunt in his ear delusions magical,
That he may fight the horses of the sea.
The Druids took them to their mystery,
And chaunted for three days.

In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.

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

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

I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,
I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had,
But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;
I ran, I ran, from my love's side because my Heart went mad.

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?

I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.

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.

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

Time can but make her beauty over again.

Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.

Overcome the Empyrean; hurl
Heaven and Earth out of their places,
That in the same calamity
Brother and brother, friend and friend,
Family and family,
City and city may contend.

I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

Only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art.

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.

Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.

My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theater business, management of men.

O heart, be at peace, because
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause,
Being for a woman's sake.

Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.

Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul.

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

How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills.

Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun Now I may wither into the truth.

Those men that in their writings are most wise
Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.

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.

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

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.

Florence Farr once said to me, If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, 'this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know,' we could die upon the instant and be united with God.

O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,
The poets labouring all their days
To build a perfect beauty in rhyme
Are overthrown by a woman's gaze.

My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
This Land of Saints, and then as the applause died out,
Of plaster Saints; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged In rambling talk with an image of air: Vague memories, nothing but memories.

Come near; I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.

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.

Myself I must remake.

Poetry and music I have banished,
But the stupidity
Of root, shoot, blossom or clay
Makes no demand.
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.

A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote.
A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat.
So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote.

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.

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

How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?

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.

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.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain,
The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord,
Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred,
Troy backed its Helen, Troy died and adored;
Great nations blossom above,
A slave bows down to a slave.

I bear a burden that might well try
Men that do all by rule,
And what can I
That am a wandering-witted fool
But pray to God that He ease
My great responsibilities?

And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.

All through the years of our youth
Neither could have known
Their own thought from the other's,
We were so much at one.

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.

The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,
And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,
For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,
With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold.

All dreams of the soul
End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.

I am haunted by numberless islands, many a Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!

Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

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.

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain.
Because the mountain grass
Cannot keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

Because this age and the next age
Engender in the ditch,
No man can know a happy man
From any passing wretch,
If Folly link with Elegance
No man knows which is which.

Although our love is waning, let us stand by the lone border of the lake once more, together in that hour of gentleness. When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.

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.

Now must we sing and sing the best we can,
But first you must be told your character:
Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.

Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

Somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class.

Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

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

Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.

Let the new faces play what tricks they will
In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,
Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,
The living seem more shadowy than they.

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

There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.

May we two stand,
When we are dead, beyond the setting suns,
A little from other shades apart,
With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.