W.B.Yeats Quotes

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

Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it.

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

I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

When one gets quiet, then something wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet like the stars.

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find

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

Love comes in at the eye.

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

To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart

I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Ah, faerics, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune!
While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.

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

And when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out

And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.

O hiding hair and dewy eyes, I am no more with life and death, My heart upon his warm heart lies, My breath is mixed into his breath.

Nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

A lonely impulse of delight

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.

The living can assist the imagination of the dead ...

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

What can be explained is not poetry.

And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.

There is no truth
Saving in thine own heart.
-from The Song of the Happy Shepherd

And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings ...

It's a long lane that has no turning.

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

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.

I will make rigid my roots and branches. It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers.

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.

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

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.

For nothing can be sole or whole. That has not been rent.

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

What's the use of held note or a held line
That cannot be assailed for reassurance?

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.

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me
("The Circus Animal's Desertion")

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

better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and unreason alike,

I shall arise and go to Innisfree

Before us lies eternity our souls
are love and a continual farewell

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Oh, who could have foretold That the heart grows old?

My wretched dragon is perplexed.

She looked in my heart one day And saw your image was there; She has gone weeping away.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

Surely some revelation is at hand.

Weaving olden dances; mingling hands and mingling glances.

No woman loves me, no man seeks my help, Because I be not of the things I dream.

Cast a cold eye
on life, on death
Horseman pass by

I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.

So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could recover if I shrieked
My heart's agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb.

Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself.

We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.

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

Why should the faithfullest heart most love The bitter sweetness of false faces?

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.

I hear water lapping with low sound by the shore ... I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Things fall apart;
the center cannot hold...

Hearts are not to be had as a gift, hearts are to be earned.

Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.

Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death,

What hurts the soul
My soul adores

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

I carry the Sun in a Golden Cup, the Moon in a Silver Bag.

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

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

I am still of [the] opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood
sex and the dead.

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

Where there is nothing, there is God.

....tradition gives the one thing many shapes.

All things change, save only the fear of change.

Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.

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

Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell.

But he heard high up in the air
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream.
-from Fergus and the Druid

There are no strangers, only friends you have not met yet.

Rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination

Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.

Myself I must remake.

Now days are dragon-ridden.

Every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without scratching.

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those who are not entirely beautiful.

A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again

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

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone
It's with O' Leary in the grave
(September 1913)

if one writes one can do nothing else.

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.

The land of fairy, where nobody gets old and godly and grave, where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue

Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.