Quotes from William Butler Yeats

And I may dine at journey's endWith Landor and with Donne.

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned...

Somewhere beyond the curtainOf distorting daysLives that lonely thingThat shone before these eyesTargeted, trod like Spring.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Land of Heart's Desire,Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

May she be granted beauty and yet not Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, Or hers before a looking-glass, 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....

The Land of Faery,Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

If there's no hatred in a mindAssault and battery of the windCan never tear the linnet from the leaf.

One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,They paddle in the coldCompanionable streams or climb the air;Their hearts have not grown old.

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mindAnd lost the old nonchalance of the hand;Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush,We are but critics, or but half create.

Upon the brimming water among the stonesAre nine-and-fifty swans.

This great purple butterfly, In the prison of my hands, Has a learning in his eye Not a poor fool understands.

One sinks in on God; we do not see the truth; God sees the truth in us…. Tell them, Fool, that when the life and the mind are broken, the truth comes through them like peas through a broken peascod.

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

Imagining in excited reverieThat the future years had come,Dancing to a frenzied drum,Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clasp its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress.

Things said or done long years ago,Or things I did not do or sayBut thought that I might say or do,Weigh me down, and not a dayBut something is recalled,My conscience or my vanity appalled.

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold,Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

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.Better go down upon your marrow-bonesAnd scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones."

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

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

My temptation is quiet.Here at life's endNeither loose imagination,Nor the mill of the mindConsuming its rag and bone,Can make the truth known.

Whence had they come,The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?What sacred drama through her body heavedWhen world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?