W B Yeats Quotes

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love ~ W.B.Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect. ~ W.B. Yeats

Myself I must remake. ~ W.B.Yeats

The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism wa ~ W.B. Yeats

Literature is, to my mind, the great teaching power of the world, the ultimate creator of all values, and it is this, not only in the sacred books whose power everybody acknowledges, but by every movement of imagination in song or story or drama that height of intensity and sincerity has made literature at all. Literature must take the responsibility of its power, and keep all its freedom: it must be like the spirit and like the wind that blows where it listeth; it must claim its right to pierce through every crevice of human nature, and to descrive the relation of the soul and the heart to the facts of life and of law, and to describe that relation as it is, not as we would have it be ... ~ W.B.Yeats

A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again ~ W.B.Yeats

When one gets quiet, then something wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet like the stars. ~ W.B.Yeats

Jerome. That is a terribly wild thought. I hope you don't believe all you say. Paul Ruttledge. Perhaps not. I only know that I want to upset everything about me. Have you not noticed that it is a complaint many of us have in this country? and whether it comes from love or hate I don't know, they are so mixed together here. ~ W.B.Yeats

Love comes in at the eye. ~ W.B.Yeats

...Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World!
You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled
Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring
The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.
Beauty grown sad with its eternity
Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea.
Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait,
For God has bid them share an equal fate;
And when at last defeated in His wars,
They have gone down under the same white stars,
We shall no longer hear the little cry
Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die. ~ W.B. Yeats

For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,"Here is the fiddler of Dooney!" / And dance like a wave of the sea. ~ W.B.Yeats

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. ~ W.B.Yeats

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. ~ W.B.Yeats

A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream.
-from Fergus and the Druid ~ W.B.Yeats

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

I Sing what was lost and dread what was won,
I walk in a battle fought over again ~ W.B.Yeats

THE HOST is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;
Caolte tossing his burning hair
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
The host is rushing 'twixt night and day,
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caolte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away ~ W.B.Yeats

And when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out ~ W.B.Yeats

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away. ~ W.B.Yeats

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. ~ W.B.Yeats

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. ~ W.B.Yeats

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens. ~ W.B.Yeats

Surely some revelation is at hand. ~ W.B.Yeats

In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities ; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, 'Here are lions.' Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, 'Here are ghosts. ~ W.B. Yeats

I had this thought a while ago,
"My darling cannot understand
What I have done, or what would do
In this blind bitter land.'
And I grew weary of the sun
Until my thoughts cleared up again,
Remembering that the best I have done
Was done to make it plain;
That every year I have cried, "At length
My darling understands it all,
Because I have come into my strength,
And words obey my call';
That had she done so who can say
What would have shaken from the sieve?
I might have thrown poor words away
And been content to live. ~ W.B.Yeats

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. ~ W.B.Yeats

To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because you have taught me my trade. ~ Lady Gregory

I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. - W. B. YEATS ~ Al Alvarez

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress ~ W.B.Yeats

An intellectual hatred is the worst. ~ W.B.Yeats

I will arise and go now,
And go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there,
Of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there,
A hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there,
For peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning
To where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer,
And noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings

I will arise and go now,
For always night and day
I hear lake water lapping
With low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway
Or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core. ~ W.B.Yeats

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
- William Butler Yeats, He Wishes For The Cloth of Heaven. ~ W.B. Yeats

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. ~ W.B.Yeats

Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it. ~ W.B.Yeats

The jester walked in the garden:
The garden had fallen still;
He bade his soul rise upward
And stand on her window-sill.

It rose in a straight blue garment,
When owls began to call:
It has grown wise-tongued by thinking
Of a quiet and light footfall;

But the young queen would not listen;
She rose in her pale night-gown;
She drew in the heavy casement
And pushed the latches down... ~ W.B. Yeats

Chance and Destiny have between them woven two-thirds of all history, and of the history of Ireland wellnigh the whole. The literature of a nation, on the other hand, is spun out of its heart. If you would know Ireland - body and soul - you must read its poems and stories. They came into existence to please nobody but the people of Ireland. Government did not make them on the one hand, nor bad seasons on the other. They are Ireland talking to herself. ~ W.B.Yeats

What hurts the soul
My soul adores ~ W.B.Yeats

Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet. ~ W.B.Yeats

....tradition gives the one thing many shapes. ~ W.B.Yeats

I spit upon the dancers painted by Degas. I spit upon their short bodies, their stiff stays, their toes whereupon they spin like peg-tops, above all upon that chambermaid face. They might have looked timeless, Remeses the Great, but not the chambermaid, that old maid history. I spit! I spit! I spit! ~ W.B.Yeats

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.
- Memory ~ W.B.Yeats

For nothing can be sole or whole. That has not been rent. ~ W.B.Yeats

The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner. ~ W.B.Yeats

I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes, But when this soul, its body off, Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows, And give his own and take his own And rule in his own right; And though it loved in misery Close and cling so tight, There's not a bird of day that dare Extinguish that delight. ~ W.B.Yeats

I think that a fierce woman's better, a woman
That breaks away when you have thought her won,
For I'd be fed and hungry at one time. ~ W.B.Yeats

I had fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips. ~ W.B. Yeats

Many years before, she had read, and recognized as true, the words of W. B. Yeats: 'A Pity beyond all telling is hit at the heart of love'. She had smiled over the poem, and stroked the page, because she had known both that she loved Colin, and that compassion formed a huge part of her love. ~ J.K. Rowling

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober. ~ W.B.Yeats

Sometimes, but only for a moment, I saw a faint solitary
figure with a Rosa veiled face, and carrying a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like a dream within a
dream, like a shadow of a shadow, and I knew by an understanding born from a deeper fountain than thought,
that it was Eros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or woman from the beginning of the
world has ever known what love is, or looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities is altogether a spirit,
and hides in passions not of his essence if he would commune with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly
he knows love through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and if ignobly through vehement
jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable desire; but unveiled love he never knows. ~ W.B.Yeats

Everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy kind of delight. ~ W.B.Yeats

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

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore
written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen,
and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined. ~ W.B.Yeats

the cloak of Sorrow: O ~ W.B.Yeats

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum
however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology
he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him ... (from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124). ~ W.B.Yeats

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD
WHO dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet. ~ W.B.Yeats

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. ~ W.B.Yeats

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn? ~ W.B.Yeats

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? 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.
(A Teller of Tales) ~ W.B.Yeats

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died? ~ W.B.Yeats

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

The first time I saw him he was cooking mushrooms for himself; the next time he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. He was indeed always cheerful, though I thought I could see in his eyes (swift as the eyes of a rabbit, when they peered out of their wrinkled holes) a melancholy which was well-nigh a portion of their joy; the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures and of all animals. ~ W.B.Yeats

Nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. ~ W.B.Yeats

Before The World Was Made
If I make the lashes dark
and the eyes more bright
and the lips more scarlet,
or ask if all be right
from mirror after mirror,
no vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
before the world was made.
What if I look upon a man
as though on my beloved,
and my blood be cold the while
and my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
before the world was made. ~ W.B.Yeats

[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

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

He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or to make him sad. I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, 'Am I not annoyed with them?' I asked too if he had ever seen the banshee. 'I have seen it,' he said, 'down there by the water, batting the river with its hands.' ("A Teller of Tales") ~ W.B.Yeats

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. ~ W.B.Yeats

How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born? ~ W.B.Yeats

I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head. ~ W.B.Yeats

In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet
("Oil and Blood") ~ W.B.Yeats

I hear water lapping with low sound by the shore ... I hear it in the deep heart's core. ~ W.B.Yeats

We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it. ~ W.B.Yeats

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live. ~ W.B.Yeats

Oh, who could have foretold That the heart grows old? ~ W.B.Yeats

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face. ~ W.B.Yeats

It's a long lane that has no turning. ~ W.B.Yeats

She looked in my heart one day And saw your image was there; She has gone weeping away. ~ W.B.Yeats

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 lost
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. ~ W.B.Yeats

For he comes, the human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping
than he can understand. ~ W.B.Yeats

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those who are not entirely beautiful. ~ W.B.Yeats

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me
("The Circus Animal's Desertion") ~ W.B.Yeats

And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings ... ~ W.B.Yeats

It's called 'The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935'. They let a man named Yeats make the choosings. They shouldn't have. Who is he - and what does he know about verse?
I hunted through that book for poems by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. There weren't any - not one. And do you know why not? Because Mr Yeats said - he said, "I deliberately chose NOT to include any poems from World War I. I have a distaste for them. Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon. ~ W.B.Yeats

THE ROSE

TOTHE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;
And thine own sadness, where of stars, grown old
In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,
Sing in their high and lonely melody.
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.
Come near, come near, come near - Ah, leave me still
A little space for the rose-breath to fill!
Lest I no more bear common things that crave;
The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,
The field-mouse running by me in the grass,
And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.
Come near; I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.


A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream. ~ W.B. Yeats

I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell. ~ W.B.Yeats

Each county has usually some family, or personage, supposed to have been favoured or plagued, especially by the phantoms, as the Hackets of Castle Hacket, Galway, who had for their ancestor a fairy, or John-o'-Daly of Lisadell, Sligo, who wrote Eilleen Aroon, ~ W.B.Yeats

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking. ~ W.B.Yeats

We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive. ~ W.B.Yeats

Now days are dragon-ridden. ~ W.B.Yeats

Nor are there singing schools but studying monuments of its own magnificence. ~ W.B.Yeats

Rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination ~ W.B.Yeats

Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all. ~ W.B.Yeats

Mr. Dowler, could you go through this? Mr. Algie. Don't answer him, Dowler; he's going beyond all bounds. Paul Ruttledge. I was a rich man and I could not, and yet I am something smaller than a camel, and this is something larger than a needle's eye. ~ W.B.Yeats

Weaving olden dances; mingling hands and mingling glances. ~ W.B.Yeats

Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. ~ W.B.Yeats

Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun - the shoemaker. ~ W.B.Yeats

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing can hold them from being all that the heart desires.
from a preface to
Gods and Fighting Men
by Lady Augusta Gregory ~ W.B.Yeats

I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find ~ W.B.Yeats

A Drinking Song Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh. ~ W.B.Yeats