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W.B. Yeats Quotes | Quotes said by W.B. Yeats

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #1

    (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)


  • W.B. Yeats Quote #2

    ...I was shocked and astonished when a daring little girl -- a cousin I think -- having waited under a group of trees in the avenue, where she knew [my grandfather] would pass near four o'clock on the way to his dinner, said to him, 'If I were you and you were a little girl, I would give you a doll.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #3

    When You Are Old

    When you are old and grey and full of sleep
    And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
    And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
    Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

    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.

    And bending down beside the glowing bars,
    Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
    And paced upon the mountains overhead,
    And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #4

    Ephemera

    Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
    Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
    Because our love is waning.

    And then she:
    Although our love is waning, let us stand
    By the lone border of the lake once more,
    Together in that hour of gentleness
    When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep:
    How far away the stars seem, and how far
    Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!

    Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
    While slowly he whose hand held hers replied:
    Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.

    The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
    Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once
    A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;
    Autumn was over him: and now they stood
    On the lone border of the lake once more:
    Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves
    Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
    In bosom and hair.

    Ah, do not mourn, he said,
    That we are tired, for other loves await us;
    Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
    Before us lies eternity; our souls
    Are love, and a continual farewell.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #5

    Politics

    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!

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #6

    The Scholars
    Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
    Old, learned, respectable bald heads
    Edit and annotate the lines
    That young men, tossing on their beds,
    Rhymed out in love’s despair
    To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

    They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
    Wear out the carpet with their shoes
    Earning respect; have no strange friend;
    If they have sinned nobody knows.
    Lord, what would they say
    Should their Catullus walk that way?

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #7

    The Song of Wandering Aengus

    I went out to the hazel wood,
    Because a fire was in my head,
    And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
    And hooked a berry to a thread;
    And when white moths were on the wing,
    And moth-like stars were flickering out,
    I dropped the berry in a stream
    And caught a little silver trout.

    When I had laid it on the floor
    I went to blow the fire a-flame,
    But something rustled on the floor,
    And someone called me by my name:
    It had become a glimmering girl
    With apple blossom in her hair
    Who called me by my name and ran
    And faded through the brightening air.

    Though I am old with wandering
    Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
    I will find out where she has gone,
    And kiss her lips and take her hands;
    And walk among long dappled grass,
    And pluck till time and times are done,
    The silver apples of the moon,
    The golden apples of the sun.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #8

    To a Child Dancing in the Wind

    Dance there upon the shore;
    What need have you to care
    For wind or water’s roar?
    And tumble out your hair
    That the salt drops have wet;
    Being young you have not known
    The fool’s triumph, nor yet
    Love lost as soon as won,
    Nor the best labourer dead
    And all the sheaves to bind.
    What need have you to dread
    The monstrous crying of wind?

    Has no one said those daring
    Kind eyes should be more learn’d?
    Or warned you how despairing
    The moths are when they are burned,
    I could have warned you, but you are young,
    So we speak a different tongue.

    O you will take whatever’s offered
    And dream that all the world’s a friend,
    Suffer as your mother suffered,
    Be as broken in the end.
    But I am old and you are young,
    And I speak a barbarous tongue.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #9

    A couple of hours after Sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance, because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, on which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the spirit set free.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #10

    A lonely impulse of delight

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #11

    Ah, faerics, dancing under the moon,
    A Druid land, a Druid tune!
    While still I may, I write for you
    The love I lived, the dream I knew.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    An Irish Airman foresees his Death

    I Know that I shall meet my fate
    Somewhere among the clouds above;
    Those that I fight I do not hate
    Those that I guard I do not love,
    My country is Kiltartan Cross,
    My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
    No likely end could bring them loss
    Or leave them happier than before.
    Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
    Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
    A lonely impulse of delight
    Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
    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 Quote #14

    And now he is singing a bard's curse upon you, O brother abbot, and upon your father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother, nd upon all your relations.'
    Is he cursing in rhyme?'
    He is cursing in rhyme, and with two assonances in every line of his curse.'
    (The Crucifixion Of The Outcast)

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #15

    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.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #16

    Before me floats an image, man or shade,
    Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
    For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
    May unwind the winding path;
    A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
    Breathless mouths may summon;
    (Byzantium)

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #17

    Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #18

    BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart,
    The holy tree is growing there;
    From joy the holy branches start,
    And all the trembling flowers they bear.
    The changing colours of its fruit
    Have dowered the stars with merry light;
    The surety of its hidden root
    Has planted quiet in the night;
    The shaking of its leafy head
    Has given the waves their melody,
    And made my lips and music wed,
    Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
    There the Loves a circle go,
    The flaming circle of our days,
    Gyring, spiring to and fro
    In those great ignorant leafy ways;
    Remembering all that shaken hair
    And how the wingèd sandals dart,
    Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
    Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

    Gaze no more in the bitter glass
    The demons, with their subtle guile,
    Lift up before us when they pass,
    Or only gaze a little while;
    For there a fatal image grows
    That the stormy night receives,
    Roots half hidden under snows,
    Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
    For all things turn to barrenness
    In the dim glass the demons hold,
    The glass of outer weariness,
    Made when God slept in times of old.
    There, through the broken branches, go
    The ravens of unresting thought;
    Flying, crying, to and fro,
    Cruel claw and hungry throat,
    Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
    And shake their ragged wings; alas!
    Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
    Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

    - The Two Trees

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #19

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

    (Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven)

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #20

    By the Hospital Lane goes the 'Faeries Path.' Every evening they travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, 'In the name of God, who are you?' He got up and went out, saying, 'Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.' She woke her husband and told him. 'One of the good people has been with us,' said he. (Village Ghosts)

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #21

    Come away, O human child!
    To the waters and the wild
    With a faery, hand in hand,
    For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #22

    Does the imagination dwell the most
    Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #23

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

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #24

    Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
    Enwrought with golden and silver light,
    The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
    Of night and light and the half light,
    I would spread the cloths under your feet:
    But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
    I have spread my dreams under your feet;
    Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #25

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

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #26

    Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #27

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

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #28

    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 Quote #29

    I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find

  • W.B. Yeats Quote #30

    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.

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