W.B. Yeats Quotes

What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?

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.

Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.

Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade.

We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936

Many ingenious lovely things are gone / That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.

The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

While they danced they came over them the weariness with the world, the melancholy, the pity one for the other, which is the exultation of love.

Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.

There are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.

Our words must seem to be inevitable.

A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.

Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room.

I have no question: It is enough, I know what fixed the station Of star and cloud. And knowing all, I cry. . . .

While on that old grey stone I sat Under the old wind-broken tree, I knew that One is animate, Mankind inanimate phantasy.

. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death

I would that there was nothing in the world But my beloved that night and day had perished, And all that is and all that is to be, All that is not the meeting of our lips.

I would that I were an old beggar Rolling a blind pearl eye, For he cannot see my lady Go gallivanting by.

I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.

A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him up for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.

Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told; I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart.

Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?

In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?

As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead, For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said. Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind.

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.

I say that Roger Casement Did what he had to do, He died upon the gallows But that is nothing new.

But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.

How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?

Time can but make her beauty over again.

What the world's million lips are searching for, must be substantial somewhere.

For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.

Education is not about filling a pail, it's about lighting a fire.

The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it.

Education is not filling

How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ?

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.

Laughter not time destroyed my voice And put that crack in it, And when the moon's pot-bellied I get a laughing fit.

I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.

Because the priest must have like every dog his day Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon, We and our dolls being but the world were best away.

The old priest Peter Gilligan Was weary night and day; For half his flock were in their beds, Or under green sods lay.

While man can still his body keep Wine or love drug him to sleep, Waking he thanks the Lord that he Has body and its stupidity.

While Michael Angelo's Sistine roof, His "Morning" and his "Night" disclose How sinew that has been pulled tight, Or it may be loosened in repose, Can rule by supernatural right Yet be but sinew.

Between extremities Man runs his course; A brand, or flaming breath, Comes to destroy All those antinomies Of day and night.

My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day's war with every knave and dolt, Theater business, management of men.

Overcome the Empyrean; hurl Heaven and Earth out of their places, That in the same calamity Brother and brother, friend and friend, Family and family, City and city may contend.