W.B. Yeats Quotes page 3

“I whispered, 'I am too young,' and then, 'I am old enough'; wherefore I threw a penny to find out if I might love.”

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

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“My wretched dragon is perplexed.”

“Love comes in at the eye.”

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

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

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.

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

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

“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.”

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

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

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

“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?”

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?

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

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

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

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

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

“Things fall apart;
the center cannot hold…”

Source: The Collected Poems of 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.”

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Where there is nothing, there is God.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

Source: Selected Poetry

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

The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1663/ In The Seven Woods (1904) Context: I heard the old, old men say, 'Everything alters, And one by one we drop away.' They had hands like claws, and their knees Were twisted like the old thorn-trees By the waters. I heard the old, old men say, 'All that's beautiful drifts away Like the waters.

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

“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.”

“A lonely impulse of delight”

“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.”

W.B. Yeats book The Winding Stair and Other Poems

The Choice http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1602/, st. 1 The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

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

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

“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.”

The Lake Isle of Innisfree http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1641/, st. 1 The Rose (1893) Context: 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 honeybee, 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;

“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.”

St. 3 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), A Prayer For My Daughter http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1421/

“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.”

I, st. 4 The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/

“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.”

St. 3 The Tower (1928), Sailing to Byzantium http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1575/

“O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name.”

Speech (3 March 1926), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Coinage Bill. http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/S/0006/S.0006.192603030003.html

“Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked— and where are they?”

St. 4 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Easter, 1916 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1477/

“A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.”

V, st. 3 The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/

“Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain
Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end.”

St. 1 In The Seven Woods (1904), Adam's Curse http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1431/

“Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.”

Responsibilities - Introduction http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1572/ Responsibilities (1914)

“The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky.”

V, st. 2 The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/

“Whether they knew or not,
Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard’s eye.”

The Wild Swans At Coole http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1712/, st. 1 The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

W.B. Yeats book The Winding Stair and Other Poems

The Seven Sages http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1685/ The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

“All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.”

“Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.”

Lapis Lazuli http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1522/, st. 2 Last Poems (1936-1939)

“What were all the world’s alarms
To mighty Paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen’s arms?”

St. 3 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Easter, 1916 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1477/

W.B. Yeats book The Winding Stair and Other Poems

Lullaby http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1527/, st. 1 The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

“The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.”

“I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all — the colleges I mean — like an opera.”

The Countess Cathleen http://www.letras.ufrj.br/veralima/6_referencias/63_e_texts_2005/yeats/countess_cathleen/yeats_countess_cathleen_2005.htm, last lines (1892)