Top 100 Quotes About Yeats
#1. The chief imagination of Christendom,
Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself
That he has made that hollow face of his
More plain to the mind's eye than any face
But that of Christ.
William Butler Yeats
#2. Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
William Butler Yeats
#3. We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather around us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet. William Butler Yeats
Jack Kornfield
#4. 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
#6. Give to these children, new from the world,
Rest far from men.
Is anything better, anything better?
Tell us it then ...
William Butler Yeats
#7. I did not, but i saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.
W.B.Yeats
#8. 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
#9. Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul
William Butler Yeats
#10. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
William Butler Yeats
#11. I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.
Patti Smith
#12. 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
#13. From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.
William Butler Yeats
#14. The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.
William Butler Yeats
#15. Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action, for we would not change that which we love.
William Butler Yeats
#16. 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
#17. But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.
William Butler Yeats
#18. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#19. The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.
Reynolds Price
#21. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#22. 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
#23. I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats
#24. The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream.
William Butler Yeats
#26. may tranquillity walk by his elbow When wandering in the forest, if he love No
W.B.Yeats
#27. 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 ...
William Butler Yeats
#28. Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.
William Butler Yeats
#30. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
W.B.Yeats
#31. All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
William Butler Yeats
#32. What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms?
William Butler Yeats
#33. Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
W.B.Yeats
#34. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#35. If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.
William Butler Yeats
#36. The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
William Butler Yeats
#37. When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream ...
William Butler Yeats
#38. Now must we sing and sing the best we can,
But first you must be told your character:
Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.
William Butler Yeats
#39. 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
#40. Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
William Butler Yeats
#41. The Light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed
The Shadow of Shadows looks on the deed alone.
W.B.Yeats
#42. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#43. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#44. He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand.
Edmund Wilson
#46. And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
William Butler Yeats
#47. [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
#48. You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.
William Butler Yeats
#49. The would-be maturing believer is not challenged to any adult faith or service to the world, much less mystical union. Everyone ends up in a muddled middle, where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as William Butler Yeats put it.
Richard Rohr
#50. Man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality ...
William Butler Yeats
#51. I would that I were an old beggar
Rolling a blind pearl eye,
For he cannot see my lady
Go gallivanting by.
William Butler Yeats
#52. If what I say resonates with you, it's merely because we're branches of the same tree.
William Butler Yeats
#53. David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision
James Hollis
#54. I know of the leafy paths that the witches take
Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,
And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake ...
William Butler Yeats
#55. How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
W.B.Yeats
#56. Boughs have their fruit and blossom
At all times of the year;
Rivers are running over
With red beer and brown beer.
William Butler Yeats
#58. 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
#60. A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
William Butler Yeats
#61. 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
#62. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#63. I thought of rhyme alone,
For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble
And make the daylight sweet once more ...
William Butler Yeats
#64. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#65. O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
William Butler Yeats
#66. For such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend. r
William Butler Yeats
#67. Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.
William Butler Yeats
#68. God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone.
W.B.Yeats
#69. Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it.
W.B.Yeats
#71. The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
W.B.Yeats
#72. 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!
William Butler Yeats
#73. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#74. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#75. Many times man lives and dies
Betweeen his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead
William Butler Yeats
#76. And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place ...
William Butler Yeats
#77. Before us lies eternity our souls
are love and a continual farewell
W.B.Yeats
#78. For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
W.B.Yeats
#79. Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
William Butler Yeats
#80. There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be a work so great
As that which cleans man's dirty slate.
William Butler Yeats
#82. Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.
W.B.Yeats
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. What can be explained is not poetry.
W.B.Yeats
#87. I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay
William Butler Yeats
#88. 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
#89. 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 ...
William Butler Yeats
#90. It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.
William Butler Yeats
#91. And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
W.B.Yeats
#92. What's the use of held note or a held line
That cannot be assailed for reassurance?
W.B.Yeats
#93. 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
#94. If Michael, leader of God's host
When Heaven and Hell are met,
Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post
He would his deeds forget.
William Butler Yeats
#95. Rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination
W.B.Yeats
#96. 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
#97. Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
William Butler Yeats
#98. It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.
William Butler Yeats
#99. My wretched dragon is perplexed.
W.B.Yeats
#100. I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats is enough for me.
Linda Hamilton
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