Quotes from William Butler Yeats

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.

The hare grows old as she plays in the sun And gazes around her with eyes of brightness; Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done She limps along in an aged whiteness.

I had a chair at every hearth, When no one turned to see, With 'Look at that old fellow there, 'And who may he be?

Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate, Know his work or choose his mate. Poet and sculptor, do the work, Nor let the modish painter shirk

All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake.

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ?

When we are high and airy hundreds say That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place, While those same hundreds mock another day Because we have made our art of common things.

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.

In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

There is no release In a bodkin or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's dirty slate.

For such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Tis the eternal law, That first in beauty should be first in might.

From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.

Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by

What shall I do for pretty girls Now my old bawd is dead?

And say my glory was I had such friends.

You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.

For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.

Eyes spiritualised by death can judge, I cannot, but I am not content.

A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.