Quotes from William Butler Yeats

In dreams begins responsibility.

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.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!

Man's life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?

Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.

Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.

Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.

yet it seems Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind, Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams, But the torn petals strew the garden plot; And there's but common greenness after that.

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 carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.

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.

O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet.

I have nothing but the embittered sun; Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun.

Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

Everything in nature is resurrection.

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.

All that could run or leap or swim Whether in wood, water or cloud, Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him.

Civilisation is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace By manifold illusion.

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

even The bed of love, that in the imagination Had seemed to be the giver of all peace, Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting, And as soon finished.