Quotes from William Butler Yeats

That toil of growing up;The ignominy of boyhood; the distressOf boyhood changing into man;The unfinished man and his pain.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned.

What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?

Grant me an old man's frenzy,Myself must I remakeTill I am Timon and LearOr that William BlakeWho beat upon the wallTill Truth obeyed his call.

Even when the poet seems most himself… he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

Fifteen apparitions have I seen;The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

Now that my ladder's gone,I must lie down where all the ladders start,In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Speech after long silence; it is right,All other lovers being estranged or dead…That we descant and yet again descantUpon the supreme theme of Art and Song:Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; youngWe loved each other and were ignorant.

Down the mountain wallsFrom where Pan's cavern isIntolerable music falls.Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,Belly, shoulder, bum,Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrsCopulate in the foam.

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

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

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flitFlames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit.

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

Heaven blazing into the head:Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,And all the drop-scenes drop at onceUpon a hundred thousand stages,It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

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

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

You think it horrible that lust and rageShould dance attention upon my old age;They were not such a plague when I was young;What else have I to spur me into song?

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

All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,For all their broomsticks and their tears,Their angry tears, are gone.

Pardon, old fathers.

He that sings a lasting songThinks in a marrowbone.

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obedience to the heart.

Once out of nature I shall never takeMy bodily form from any natural thing,But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths makeOf hammered gold and gold enamelingTo keep a drowsy Emperor awake;Or set upon a golden bough to singTo lords and ladies of ByzantiumOf what is past, or passing, or to come.