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William Butler Yeats
176 quotes
“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?”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then he struggled with the mind; His proud heart he left behind. Now his wars on God begin; At stroke of midnight God shall win.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If soul may look and body touch, Which is the more blest?”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My temptation is quiet. Here at life’s end Neither loose imagination, Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You that would judge me, do not judge alone This book or that, come to this hallowed place Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; Think where man's glory most begins and ends And say my glory was I had such friends.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Down the mountain walls From where pan’s cavern is Intolerable music falls. Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A bloody and a sudden end, Gunshot or a noose, For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because there is safety in derision I talked about an apparition, I took no trouble to convince, Or seem plausible to a man of sense.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have found nothing half so good As my long-planned half solitude, Where I can sit up half the night With some friend that has the wit Not to allow his looks to tell When I am unintelligible.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Irish poets, earn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees Hum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile Tara uprooted, and new commonness Upon the throne and crying about the streets And hanging its paper flowers from post to post, Because it is alone of all things happy. I am contented, for I know that Quiet Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer, Who but awaits His house to shoot, still hands A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One that is ever kind said yesterday: 'Your well-belovéd's hair has threads of grey, And little shadows come about her eyes; Time can but make it easier to be wise Though now it seems impossible, and so All that you need is patience. Heart cries, 'No, I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain. Time can but make her beauty over again: Because of that great nobleness of hers The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs, Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways When all the wild summer was in her gaze. O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head, You'd know the folly of being comforted.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I swayed upon the gaudy stern The butt-end of a steering-oar, And saw wherever I could turn A crowd upon a shore. And though I would have hushed the crowd, There was no mother's son but said, 'What is the figure in a shroud Upon a gaudy bed?' And after running at the brim Cried out upon that thing beneath --It had such dignity of a limb-- By the sweet name of Death. Though I'd my finger on my lip, What could I but take up the song? And running crowd and gaudy ship Cried out the whole night long, Crying amid the glittering sea, Naming it with the ecstatic breath, Because it had such dignity, By the sweet name of Death.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause Being for a woman's sake. Enough if the work has seemed, So did she your strength renew, A dream that a lion had dreamed Till the wilderness cried aloud, A secret between you two, Between the proud and the proud.What, still you would have their praise! But here's a haughtier text, The labyrinth of her days That her own strangeness perplexed; And how what her dreaming gave Earned slander, ingratitude, From self-same dolt and knave; Aye, and worse wrong than these. Yet she, singing upon her road, Half lion, half child, is at peace.”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; 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 Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again but 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?”
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) said by 1939 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source