W.B.Yeats Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by W.B.Yeats
W.B.Yeats Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from W.B.Yeats on Wise Famous Quotes.
I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown.
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.
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.
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.
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.
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.
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings ...
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.
I must lie down where all my ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
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.
And over it their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Gray Truth is now her painted toy.
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")
It was the dream itself enchanted me
("The Circus Animal's Desertion")
better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and unreason alike,
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.
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
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.
Under a broken tree.
I could recover if I shrieked
My heart's agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb.
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield
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.
Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world,
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.
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.
sex and the dead.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love
But he heard high up in the air
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream.
-from Fergus and the Druid
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream.
-from Fergus and the Druid
Every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt is a visionary without scratching.
The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.