Quotes from William Butler Yeats

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

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

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

When a man grows old his joy Grows more deep day after day, His empty heart is full at length But he has need of all that strength Because of the increasing Night That opens her mystery and fright.

Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child's laughter, a woman's kiss.

The winds that awakened the stars Are blowing through my blood.

I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

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.

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.

Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul

Many times man lives and dies Betweeen his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man die in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead

A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more?

Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.

We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.

I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.

No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.

. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death

Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.

And if joy were not on the earth, There were an end of change and birth, And Earth and Heaven and Hell would die, And in some gloomy barrow lie Folded like a frozen fly.

Let the new faces play what tricks they will In the old rooms; night can outbalance day, Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, The living seem more shadowy than they.

Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.

Give to these children, new from the world, Rest far from men. Is anything better, anything better? Tell us it then.

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.