W.B. Yeats: Trending quotes

W.B. Yeats trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection

W.B. Yeats: 510 quotes285 likes

“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.”

W.B. Yeats

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

W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 4 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Easter, 1916 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1477/ Variant: Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. Source: Easter 1916 and Other Poems

“What do we know but that we face one another in this place?”

W.B. Yeats

“Where there is nothing, there is God.”

W.B. Yeats

“For he comes, the human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping
than he can understand.”

W.B. Yeats

The Stolen Child http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1695/, st. 1 Crossways (1889) Variant: 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. Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats Context: p>Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we've hid our faery vats, Full of berries And of reddest stolen cherries.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. </p

“Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

W.B. Yeats

The Circus Animals' Desertion, III
Last Poems (1936-1939)

“Things fall apart;
the center cannot hold…”

W.B. Yeats

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone.”

W.B. Yeats

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

W.B. Yeats

“I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown.”

W.B. Yeats

“An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.”

W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 8 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), A Prayer For My Daughter http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1421/ Source: The Yeats Reader, Revised Edition: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose Context: An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of plenty’s horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?

“The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

W.B. Yeats The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1919)
Context: p>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.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?</p

“For everything that's lovely is
but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight.”

W.B. Yeats

Never Give All The Heart http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1545/ In The Seven Woods (1904) Source: Poems Context: 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 of 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.

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

W.B. Yeats book The Tower

Among School Children http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1437/, st. 8 The Tower (1928) Context: Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul. Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

“Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.”

W.B. Yeats

“Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.”

W.B. Yeats

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”

W.B. Yeats

“It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is”

W.B. Yeats

“And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.”

W.B. Yeats

“Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”

W.B. Yeats

The Municipal Gallery Revisited http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1659/, st. 7 Last Poems (1936-1939) Variant: Think where man's glory most begins and ends. And say my glory was I had such friends. Context: You that would judge me, do not judge alone This book or that, come to this hallowed place Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; Think where man's glory most begins and ends And say my glory was I had such friends.