William Butler Yeats Quotes

I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.

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How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there's a politician That has read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!

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Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.

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And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.

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Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

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Because of something told under the famished horn Of the hunter's moon, that hung between the night and the day, To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay, Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.

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BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there.

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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.

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All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

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Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power.

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We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.

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I have nothing but the embittered sun; Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun.

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O would, beloved, that you lay Under the dock-leaves in the ground, While lights were paling one by one.

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Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.

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Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.

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Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

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

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All the stream that's roaring by Came out of a needle's eye.

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I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me

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What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?

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