Quotes from W.B. Yeats

Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.

The Nineteenth Century And After Though the great song return no more There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.

if one writes one can do nothing else.

Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun—the shoemaker.

there is no truth Saving in thine own heart. -from "The Song of the Happy Shepherd

Go on, live in your poultry-yard. Scratch straw and cluck and cackle at everything that you take for a fox. [Exit.

But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of the may, Because it comes in beauty, and in beauty blows away.

What they undertook to do They brought to pass; All things hang like a drop of dew Upon a blade of grass.

The wandering earth herself may be Only a sudden flaming word, In clanging space a moment heard, Troubling the endless reverie.

The Arrow" I THOUGHT of your beauty, and this arrow, Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow. There's no man may look upon her, no man, As when newly grown to be a woman, Tall and noble but with face and bosom Delicate in colour as apple blossom. This beauty's kinder, yet for a reason I could weep that the old is out of season.

I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say: Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay, He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.

Why should the faithfullest heart most love The bitter sweetness of false faces?

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." - William Butler Yeats, He Wishes For The Cloth of Heaven.

He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories.

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh heart again in the gray twilight, Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower

Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O never give the heart outright, from "Never give all the heart

I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread

I don't think the moral is good; and if any of you thuckeens go about imitating Anty in her laziness, you'll find it won't thrive with you as it did with her. She was beautiful beyond compare, which none of you are, and she had three powerful fairies to help her besides.

They shall be remembered forever, They shall be alive forever, They shall be speaking forever, The people shall hear them forever.

A Drinking Song Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh.

So the platonic Year Whirls out new right and wrong, Whirls in the old instead; All men are dancers and their tread Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

You who are bent, and bald, and blind, With a heavy heart and a wandering mind, Have known three centuries, poets sing, Of dalliance with a demon thing.

Oh, who could have foretold That the heart grows old?