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William Butler Yeats Quotes - Page 3

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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.

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.

William Butler Yeats
Heart, Dust, Feet
William Butler Yeats (2007). “The Celtic Twilight”, p.6, Library of Alexandria

All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.

William Butler Yeats
Lying, Night, Done
William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.298, Wordsworth Editions

The winds that awakened the stars Are blowing through my blood.

William Butler Yeats
Life, Stars, Blood
William Butler Yeats (2013). “Early Poems”, p.55, Courier Corporation

Hammer your thoughts into unity.

William Butler Yeats
Unity, Hammers
William Butler Yeats (2010). “Under the Moon”, p.10, Simon and Schuster

I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made.

William Butler Yeats
World, Faces, Made
1928 'A Woman Young and Old', part 2 'Before the World was Made', stanza 1. Collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933).

Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.

William Butler Yeats
Love, Love Is, Inequality
William Butler Yeats (2008). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. XII: John Sherman and Dhoya”, p.18, Simon and Schuster

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.

William Butler Yeats
Uplifting, Dream, Spiritual
William Butler Yeats, Ulick O'Connor (1990). “The Yeats companion”, Pavilion Books

Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.

William Butler Yeats
Buckets, Hills, Companion
William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.140, Simon and Schuster

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.

William Butler Yeats
Dream, Stars, Book
"When You Are Old" l. 1 (1893)

Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast, Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest.

William Butler Yeats
Lonely, Peace, Fall
William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.49, Wordsworth Editions

Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.

William Butler Yeats
Men, Vision, Literature
William Butler Yeats (2008). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement”, p.33, Simon and Schuster

Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.

William Butler Yeats
Teaching, Fire, Filling Up

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

William Butler Yeats
Life Changing, Book, Writing
William Butler Yeats (2010). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III: Autobiogra”, p.341, Simon and Schuster

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

William Butler Yeats
Life, Heart, World
William Butler Yeats (1954). “The Letters of W.B. Yeats”

I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

William Butler Yeats
Memories, Believe, I Believe
William Butler Yeats (2001). “The Major Works”, p.344

Love comes in at the eye.

William Butler Yeats
Inspirational, Life, Eye
William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.75, Wordsworth Editions

True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.

William Butler Yeats
Love, Believe, Self
William Butler Yeats (2010). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III: Autobiogra”, p.343, Simon and Schuster

Ah, let us kiss each other's eyes,/And laugh our love away.

William Butler Yeats
Eye, Kissing, Laughing
William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.493, Simon and Schuster

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will.

William Butler Yeats
Nature, Heart, Moon
William Butler Yeats (1931). “Later Poems”, p.8, Library of Alexandria

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

William Butler Yeats
Wisdom, Philosophy, People
"Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing". Book by Larry Chang, p. 417, 2006.

Hearts are not had as a gift, But hearts are earned.

William Butler Yeats
Love, Broken Heart, Heartbreak
William Butler Yeats (1931). “Later Poems”, p.140, Library of Alexandria

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
Dream, Dark, Night
"HeWishes for the Cloths of Heaven" l. 7 (1899)

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

William Butler Yeats
Custody, Senses
Letter to Ellen O'Leary, February 03, 1889.

When you are old and gray 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.

William Butler Yeats
Beautiful, Dream, Retirement
The Countess Kathleen (1892) "When You Are Old"

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

William Butler Yeats
Individuality, Contemplation, Ecstasy
William Butler Yeats (2010). “Autobiographies: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats”, p.348, Simon and Schuster

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