William Butler Yeats Quotes

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

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

We are fastened to a dying animal.

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?

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.

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

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?

Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end.

on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.

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

A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought.

I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.

I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams.

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

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.

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

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

Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

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.

Things said or done long years ago Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.

It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.

Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.

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.

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.

Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul," I cried. "My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied."

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

Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.

Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

Nothing that we love overmuch Is ponderable to our touch.

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?

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.

Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

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.

Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade.

We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936

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

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

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

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.

Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.

There are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.

Our words must seem to be inevitable.

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

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

I have no question: It is enough, I know what fixed the station Of star and cloud. And knowing all, I cry. . . .

While on that old grey stone I sat Under the old wind-broken tree, I knew that One is animate, Mankind inanimate phantasy.

. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death