Top 100 Quotes About W.b Yeats
#1. Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
Richard Dawkins
#2. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned W. B. Yeats 'The Second Coming
Rennie Airth
#3. 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. - W. B. YEATS
Al Alvarez
#4. Irish fathers still have certain responsibilities, and by the time my two daughters turned seven, they could swim, ride a bike, sing at least one part of a Woody Guthrie song, and recite all of W. B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.'
Adrian McKinty
#5. To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because you have taught me my trade.
Lady Gregory
#6. I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.
J. Courtney Sullivan
#7. It is always reassuring to discover that great writers are as fallible as oneself. W.B. Yeats once failed to obtain an academic post in Dublin because he misspelt the word 'professor' on his application.
Terry Eagleton
#8. W. B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#9. Many years before, she had read, and recognized as true, the words of W. B. Yeats: 'A Pity beyond all telling is hit at the heart of love'. She had smiled over the poem, and stroked the page, because she had known both that she loved Colin, and that compassion formed a huge part of her love.
J.K. Rowling
#10. For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.
Kathleen Raine
#11. Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. - W. B. Yeats
Daniel Coyle
#12. After twenty centuries of stony sleep, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats - from 'The Second Coming
W.B.Yeats
#13. It's not a dream,
But the reality that makes our passion
As a lamp shadow - no - no lamp, the sun.
What the world's million lips are thirsting for
Must be substantial somewhere ...
W.B.Yeats
#14. I did not, but i saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.
W.B.Yeats
#15. 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.
W.B.Yeats
#16. 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.
W.B.Yeats
#17. 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.
W.B.Yeats
#18. The Coming of Wisdom with Time
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.
W.B.Yeats
#19. may tranquillity walk by his elbow When wandering in the forest, if he love No
W.B.Yeats
#20. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
W.B.Yeats
#21. Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
W.B.Yeats
#22. 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
W.B.Yeats
#23. The Light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed
The Shadow of Shadows looks on the deed alone.
W.B.Yeats
#25. [The banshee (from ban [bean], a woman, and shee [sidhe], a fairy) is an attendant fairy that follows the old families, and none but them, and wails before a death.
W.B.Yeats
#26. How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
W.B.Yeats
#27. Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
W.B.Yeats
#28. Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
("Byzantium")
W.B.Yeats
#29. God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone.
W.B.Yeats
#30. Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it.
W.B.Yeats
#31. The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
W.B.Yeats
#32. Before us lies eternity our souls
are love and a continual farewell
W.B.Yeats
#33. For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
W.B.Yeats
#34. Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.
W.B.Yeats
#35. The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.
W.B.Yeats
#36. You have accused me of upsetting order by my free drinks, and I have showed you that there is a more dreadful fermentation in the Sermon on the Mount than in my beer-barrels. Christ thought it in the irresponsibility of His omnipotence.
W.B.Yeats
#37. All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it
W.B.Yeats
#38. What can be explained is not poetry.
W.B.Yeats
#39. 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.
W.B.Yeats
#40. And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
W.B.Yeats
#41. What's the use of held note or a held line
That cannot be assailed for reassurance?
W.B.Yeats
#42. I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.
They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
W.B.Yeats
#43. Rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination
W.B.Yeats
#44. O bid me mount and sail up there
Amid the cloudy wrack,
For Peg and Meg and Paris' love
That had so straight a back,
Are gone away, and some that stay
Have changed their silk for sack.
W.B.Yeats
#45. My wretched dragon is perplexed.
W.B.Yeats
#46. O cowardly amd tyrannous race of monks, persecutors of the bard, and the gleemen, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit! ("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast")
W.B.Yeats
#47. And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery;
W.B.Yeats
#48. 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.
W.B.Yeats
#49. The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all
W.B.Yeats
#50. But he heard high up in the air
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
W.B.Yeats
#51. Wine enters through the mouth,
Love, the eyes.
I raise the glass to my mouth,
I look at you,
I sigh.
W.B.Yeats
#52. Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me
("The Circus Animal's Desertion")
W.B.Yeats
#53. One loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.
W.B.Yeats
#54. Everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
W.B.Yeats
#55. All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
W.B.Yeats
#56. What do we know but that we face one another in this place?
W.B.Yeats
#57. ....tradition gives the one thing many shapes.
W.B.Yeats
#58. One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.
- Memory
W.B.Yeats
#59. They shall be remembered forever,
They shall be alive forever,
They shall be speaking forever,
The people shall hear them forever.
W.B.Yeats
#60. I don't think the moral is good; and if any of you thuckeens go about imitating Anty in her laziness, you'll find it won't thrive with you as it did with her. She was beautiful beyond compare, which none of you are, and she had three powerful fairies to help her besides.
W.B.Yeats
#61. The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
W.B.Yeats
#63. Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
W.B.Yeats
#64. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
W.B.Yeats
#65. Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
W.B.Yeats
#66. Nor are there singing schools but studying monuments of its own magnificence.
W.B.Yeats
#67. I shall arise and go to Innisfree
W.B.Yeats
#68. We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love
W.B.Yeats
#69. That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know-
Although they do not talk of it at school -
That we must labor to be beautiful.
W.B.Yeats
#70. I will make rigid my roots and branches. It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers.
W.B.Yeats
#71. I wish for you constantly for I want to talk about everybody and everything. I can't go up to a stranger & say 'your manners &looks have stirred me to this profound meditation'-
W.B.Yeats
#72. In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet
("Oil and Blood")
W.B.Yeats
#73. Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
W.B.Yeats
#75. Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell.
W.B.Yeats
#76. Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.
W.B.Yeats
#77. Ah, you may tell the girls that they must now get their turn. My punishment was to last till I was thought worthy of a reward for the way I done my duty. You'll see me no more.
W.B.Yeats
#78. Oh, who could have foretold That the heart grows old?
W.B.Yeats
#79. O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
W.B.Yeats
#80. if one writes one can do nothing else.
W.B.Yeats
#81. We can only begin to live when we conceive life as
Tragedy.
W.B.Yeats
#82. Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.
W.B.Yeats
#83. Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.
W.B.Yeats
#84. Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.
W.B.Yeats
#85. We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.
W.B.Yeats
#86. better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and unreason alike,
W.B.Yeats
#87. For the winds that awakened the stars are blowing through my blood.
W.B.Yeats
#88. Where there is nothing, there is God.
W.B.Yeats
#89. SHE hears me strike the board and say
That she is under ban
Of all good men and women,
Being mentioned with a man
That has the worst of all bad names;
And thereupon replies
That his hair is beautiful,
Cold as the March wind his eyes.
W.B.Yeats
#90. When one gets quiet, then something wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet like the stars.
W.B.Yeats
#91. A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again
W.B.Yeats
#92. What is clearest, most memorable and important about art is its coming into being, and the world's best works of art, while telling of very diverse matters, are really telling about their birth.
W.B.Yeats
#93. Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death,
W.B.Yeats
#94. And when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out
W.B.Yeats
#95. When I think of life as struggle with the Daimon who would ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man loves nothing but his destiny.
W.B.Yeats
#96. I cannot now think symbols less
than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by
the master of magic or half unconsciously by their successors, the
poet, the musician, and the artist.
W.B.Yeats
#97. Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
W.B.Yeats
#98. I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self.
W.B.Yeats
#99. I hear water lapping with low sound by the shore ... I hear it in the deep heart's core.
W.B.Yeats
#100. On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires are lighted on every hill in honour of St. John, the fairies are at their gayest, and sometime steal away beautiful mortals to be their brides.
W.B.Yeats
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