Quotes from W.B. Yeats

Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.

Aedh tells of the perfect Beauty" O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman's gaze And by the unlabouring brood of the skies: And therefore my heart will bow, when dew Is dropping sleep, until God burn time, Before the unlabouring stars and you.

All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination.

She pulled the thread and bit the thread And made a golden gown, And wept because she'd dreamt that I Was born to wear a crown.

TO HIS HEART, BIIDING IT HAVE NO FEAR Be you still, be you still, trembling heart; Remember the wisdom out of the old days: Him who trembles before the flame and the flood, And the winds that blow through the starry ways, Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood Cover over and hide, for he has no part With the lonely, majestical multitude.

I HAVE desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them.

I would like to have great iron claws, and to put them about the pillars, and to pull and pull till everything fell into pieces. Jerome. I don't see what good that would do you. Paul Ruttledge. Oh, yes it would. When everything was pulled down we would have more room to get drunk in, to drink contentedly out of the cup of life, out of the drunken cup of life.

So like a bit of stone I lie Under a broken tree. I could recover if I shrieked My heart's agony To passing bird, but I am dumb.

I have nothing but a book, Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

Jerome. That is a terribly wild thought. I hope you don't believe all you say. Paul Ruttledge. Perhaps not. I only know that I want to upset everything about me. Have you not noticed that it is a complaint many of us have in this country? and whether it comes from love or hate I don't know, they are so mixed together here.

the Byzantine style, which so few care for to-day, but which moves me because these tall, emaciated angels and saints seem to have less relation to the world about us than to an abstract pattern of flowing lines that suggest an imagination absorbed in the contemplation of Eternity.

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age,' Barry Pain, now a well known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older than the rest.

Once he said to me in the height of his imperial propaganda, 'Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing must go on. They say Ireland is not fit for self-government but that is nonsense. It is as fit as any other European country but we cannot grant it.

To A Squirrel At Kyle-Na-No Come play with me; Why should you run Through the shaking tree As though I'd a gun To strike you dead? When all I would do Is to scratch your head And let you go.

Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all; Many times he died, Many times rose again. A great man in his pride Confronting murderous men Casts derision upon Supersession of breath; He knows death to the bone – Man has created death.

Fellow-wanderer, Could we but mix ourselves into a dream, Not in its image on the mirror!

the soul cannot live without sorrow.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!

Now days are dragon-ridden.

Go gather by the humming sea Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell. And to its lips thy story tell, And they thy comforters will be. Rewording in melodious guile Thy fretful words a little while, Till they shall singing fade in ruth And die a pearly brotherhood; For words alone are certain good: Sing, then, for this is also sooth. -from "The Song of the Happy Shepherd

What's left to sigh for, Strange night has come

Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.

Because to him, who ponders well, My rhymes more than their rhyming tell Of the dim wisdoms old and deep That God gives unto man in sleep