W.B. Yeats: Trending quotes (page 6)

“The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste.”

“Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.”

“Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.”

“May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.”

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:”

“I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head.”

“The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.”

“A lonely impulse of delight”

“I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self.”

“For the winds that awakened the stars are blowing through my blood.”

“And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings…”

“I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.”

“There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.”

“The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.”

“I am still of [the] opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood--sex and the dead.”

“When one gets quiet, then something wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet like the stars.”

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

“Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.”

“Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
Oh, when may it suffice?”