W.B. Yeats Quotes
I have nothing more to give you than my heart. Spanish saying Hearts are not to be had as a gift hearts are to be earned.
Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.
It's certain there are trout somewhere - And maybe I shall take a trout - but I do not seem to care.
O heart, we are old; The living beauty is for younger men: We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.
Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind, That loved his learning better than mankind, Though courteous to the worst; much falling he Brooded upon sanctity.
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.
We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love
For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf
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.
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?
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
My chair was nearest to the fire In every company That talked of love or politics, Ere Time transfigured me.
I bear a burden that might well try Men that do all by rule, And what can I That am a wandering-witted fool But pray to God that He ease My great responsibilities?
Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.
Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end.
on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.
People are responsible for their opinions, but Providence is responsible for their morals.
I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.
And learn that the best thing is To change my loves while dancing And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.
The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.
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?
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
Things said or done long years ago Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.
Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.
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.
Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way.
Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul," I cried. "My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied."
No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.
Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.
Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
