“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats
“I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
― W.B. Yeats
“For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.”
― W.B. Yeats
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
― William Butler Yeats
“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.”
― William Butler Yeats
“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
“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.”
― William Butler Yeats
“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.”
― William Butler 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
“Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.”
― W.B. Yeats
“Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O Never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.”
― W. B. Yeats
“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
“What can be explained is not poetry.”
― W.B. Yeats
“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”
― William Butler Yeats
“There is another world, but it is in this one.”
― William Butler Yeats
“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 sigh.”
― W.B. Yeats
“THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, ‘O sea-starved, hungry sea”
― William Butler Yeats
“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”
― William Butler 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
“In dreams begin responsibilities.”
― William Butler Yeats
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
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 drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler 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.”
― William Butler Yeats
“…I’m looking for the face I had, before the world was made…”
― William Butler Yeats
“Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.”
― William Butler Yeats
“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”
― William Butler Yeats
“There are no strangers, only friends you have not met yet.”
― William Butler Yeats
“I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams.”
― William Butler Yeats
“All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”
― William Butler 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.”
― William Butler Yeats
“The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.”
― William Butler Yeats
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
― William Butler Yeats
“Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.”
― William Butler Yeats
“To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart”
― William Butler Yeats
“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.”
― W.B. Yeats
“Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.”
― W.B. Yeats
“Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those who are not entirely beautiful.”
― William Butler Yeats
“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.”
― William Butler Yeats
“Wine enters through the mouth,
Love, the eyes.
I raise the glass to my mouth,
I look at you,
I sigh.”
― William Butler Yeats
“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”
― W.B. Yeats
“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”
― William Butler Yeats
“We can only begin to live when we conceive life as
Tragedy.”
― William Butler Yeats
“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.”
― William Butler Yeats
“Myself I must remake.”
― Yeats
“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield”
― William Butler Yeats
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”
― W.B. Yeats
“And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.”
― 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
“The Cat and the Moon
The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.”
― William Butler Yeats
“We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.”
― William Butler Yeats
“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.
– The Song of Wandering Aengus”
― William Butler Yeats
“Think where man’s glory
Most begins and ends
And say my glory was
That I had such friends.”
― William Butler Yeats