Quotes from yeats william butler ii

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.

We must be tender with all budding things. Our Maker let no thought of Calvary Trouble the morning stars in their first song.

The line of Nature is crooked ... though we dig the canal beds as straight as we can, the rivers run hither and thither in their wildness.

Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or woman lost?

No sooner had the words passed his lips than he was taken up and whisked into the moat with prodigious force; and the fairies came crowding round about him with great anger, screeching and screaming and roaring out, "Who spoiled our tune? Who spoiled our tune?"

What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?

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.

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

I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.

All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

Shakespeare watched Henry V not indeed as he watched the greater souls in the visionary procession, but cheerfully, as one watches some handsome spirited horse, and he spoke his tale, as he spoke all tales, with tragic irony.

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.