Quotes from William Butler Yeats

It seems to me that true love is a discipline.

Love comes in at the eye.

I, too, await The hour of thy great wind of love and hate. When shall the stars be blown about the sky, Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?

For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline.

It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.

What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.

Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.

I long for truth, and yet I cannot stay from that My better self disowns, For a man's attention Brings such satisfaction To the craving in my bones.

Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul," I cried. "My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied."

My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.

Nor seek, for this is also sooth, To hunger fiercely after truth, Lest all thy toiling only breeds New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth Saving in thine own heart.

Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.

Being young you have not known The fool's triumph, nor yet Love lost as soon as won, Nor the best labourer dead And all the sheaves to bind.

Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.

I broke my heart in two So hard I struck. What matter? for I know That out of rock, Out of a desolate source, Love leaps upon its course.

Ah, let us kiss each other's eyes,/And laugh our love away.

Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire, With your harmonious choir Encircle her I love and sing her into peace, That my old care may cease.

I have nothing more to give you than my heart. Spanish saying Hearts are not to be had as a gift hearts are to be earned.

We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love

Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end.

Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.