Quotes from William Butler Yeats

Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I lay them at your feet. Tread lightly, for you tread on my dreams.

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

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

The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all

The Light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed The Shadow of Shadows looks on the deed alone.

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances, Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And is anxious in its sleep. . . .

All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it

All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.

Politics How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there's a politician That has read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work.

All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

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

Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil

By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.

Ah, faerics, dancing under the moon, A Druid land, a Druid tune! While still I may, I write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew.

And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died?

Who Goes With Fergus? Who will go drive with Fergus now, And pierce the deep wood's woven shade, And dance upon the level shore? Young man, lift up your russet brow, And lift your tender eyelids, maid, And brood on hopes and fear no more. And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery; For Fergus rules the brazen cars, And rules the shadows of the wood, And the white breast of the dim sea And all dishevelled wandering stars.

Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?

It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of. [from "The Circus Animals' Desertion"]

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

nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.