Quotes by W.B. Yeats

THOUGH you are in your shining days,Voices among the crowdAnd new friends busy with your praise,Be not unkind or proud,But think about old friends the most:Times bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes.

How far away the stars seem, and how farIs our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!

ld heads forgetful of their sins,Old, learned, respectable bald headsEdit and annotate the linesThat young men, tossing on their beds,Rhymed out in love’s despairTo flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;Wear out the carpet with their shoesEarning respect; have no strange friend;If they have sinned nobody knows.Lord, what would they sayShould their Catullus walk that way?

I said: A line will take us hours maybe;Yet if it does not seem a moments thought,Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

(I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. (The Adoration of The Magi)

O cowardly amd tyrannous race of monks, persecutors of the bard, and the gleemen, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit! (The Crucifixion Of The Outcast)

There are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman told me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go trapsin about the earth at their own free will; but there are faeries, she added, and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels. I have met also a man with a mohawk Indian tattooed upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matter what one doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the mohawk Indian on his arm said to me, they stand to reason. Even the official mind does not escape this faith. (Reason and Unreason)

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is

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)

As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dr

In dreams begin responsibilities.

One loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of ones dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.

In dreams begin responsibilities

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.

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,Her soul in division from itselfClimbing, falling She knew not where,Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declareA beautiful lofty thing, or a thingHeroically lost, heroically found.No matter what disaster occurredShe stood in desperate music wound,Wound, wound, and she made in her triumphWhere the bales and the baskets layNo common intelligible soundBut sang, O sea-starved, hungry sea

Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;Remember the wisdom out of the old days:*Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,And the winds that blow through the starry ways,Let the starry winds and the flame and the floodCover over and hide, for he has no partWith the lonely, majestical multitude*.

I carry the Sun in a Golden Cup, the Moon in a Silver Bag.

Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,For I would ride with you upon the wind,Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,And dance upon the mountains like a flame.