William Butler Yeats Quotes - Page 22

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• But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.

  William Butler Yeats

  Sad, Sole, Whole

  "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" l. 13 (1932)

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• To sit beside the board and drink good wine And watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire And feel content and wisdom in your heart, This is the best of life; when we are young We long to tread a way none trod before, But find the excellent old way through love And through the care of children to the hour Forbidding Fate and Time and Change goodbye.

  William Butler Yeats

  Goodbye, Children, Heart

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales”, p.101, Penguin

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• In mockery I have set
  A powerful emblem up,
  And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
  In mockery of a time
  Half dead at the top.

  William Butler Yeats

  Powerful, Symbolism, Towers

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.241, Simon and Schuster

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• How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?

  William Butler Yeats

  Innocence, Born, Ceremony

  William Butler Yeats (2008). “COLLECTED POEMS OF W.B. YEATS”, p.478, Simon and Schuster

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• No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.

  William Butler Yeats

  Writing, Men, Land

  William Butler Yeats, Richard J. Finneran, George Bornstein (2007). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays”, p.82, Simon and Schuster

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• I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes But when this soul, its body off Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows.

  William Butler Yeats

  Clothes, Soul, Naked

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.235, Wordsworth Editions

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• Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

  William Butler Yeats

  Love, Player, Stage

  William Butler Yeats (2001). “The Major Works”, p.181

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• somewhere in sands of the desert
  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  William Butler Yeats

  Moving, Men, Bird

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats”, p.192, Simon and Schuster

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• This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.

  William Butler Yeats

  Air, Soul, London

  William Butler Yeats, Richard J. Finneran (1969). “John Sherman & Dhoya”

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• We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.

  William Butler Yeats

  Happiness, Laughter, Joy

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• There are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.

  William Butler Yeats

  Air, Doors, Southern

  William Butler Yeats (2007). “The Celtic Twilight”, p.17, Library of Alexandria

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• Death and life were not
  Till man made up the whole,
  Made lock, stock and barrel
  Out of his bitter soul

  William Butler Yeats

  Life, Men, Soul

  William Butler Yeats (1962). “Poems of William Butler Yeats”, p.428, Hayes Barton Press

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• I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?

  William Butler Yeats

  Uncles, Son, Aunt

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.329, Simon and Schuster

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• I--love's skein upon the ground,
  My body in the tomb--
  Shall leap into the light lost
  In my mother's womb.

  William Butler Yeats

  Mother, Light, Body

  William Butler Yeats (2011). “Selected Poems And Four Plays”, p.147, Simon and Schuster

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• The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.

  William Butler Yeats

  Artist, Style, Alchemist

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

  William Butler Yeats

  Light, Docks, Beloved

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.59, Wordsworth Editions

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• And God would bid His warfare cease,
  Saying all things were well;
  And softly make a rosy peace,
  A peace of Heaven with Hell.

  William Butler Yeats

  Beauty, God, Heaven

  William Butler Yeats (2013). “Early Poems”, p.26, Courier Corporation

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• I know, although when looks meet
  I tremble to the bone,
  The more I leave the door unlatched
  The sooner love is gone.

  William Butler Yeats

  Sex, Love Is, Doors

  William Butler Yeats (2001). “The Major Works”, p.137

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• If Michael, leader of God's host
  When Heaven and Hell are met,
  Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post
  He would his deeds forget.

  William Butler Yeats

  Beauty, Doors, Leader

  William Butler Yeats (2001). “The Major Works”, p.18

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• Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
  For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
  Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
  Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
  And Usna's children died.

  William Butler Yeats

  Beauty, Dream, Children

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.28, Wordsworth Editions

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• If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

  William Butler Yeats

  Poetry, Limits, Poet

  Alexander Norman Jeffares, William Butler Yeats (1984). “A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats”, Palgrave Schol, Print UK

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• While on that old grey stone I sat
  Under the old wind-broken tree,
  I knew that One is animate,
  Mankind inanimate phantasy.

  William Butler Yeats

  Reality, Wind, Broken

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.161, Wordsworth Editions

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• Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
  Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
  Life overflows without ambitious pains;
  And rains down life until the basin spills,
  And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
  As though to choose whatever shape it wills.

  William Butler Yeats

  Life, Pain, Rain

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.204, Simon and Schuster

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• So long as all is ordered for attack, and that alone, leaders will instinctively increase the number of enemies that they may give their followers something to do.

  William Butler Yeats

  Numbers, Long, Giving

  William Butler Yeats (2010). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III: Autobiogra”, p.369, Simon and Schuster

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• A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.

  William Butler Yeats

  Death, Heart, Speech

  William Butler Yeats (1997). “The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I: The Poems, 2nd Edition”, p.135, Simon and Schuster

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