All Quotes by W.B. Yeats
“Is this my dream, or the truth?”
“The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow.”
“Is this my dream, or the truth?”
“The last stroke of midnight dies.”
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“When you are old and grey and full of sleep”
“Before me floats an image, man or shade,”
“I balanced all, brought all to mind,”
“HIS chosen comrades thought at school”
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“The innocent and the beautiful”
“And after all, can we come to so great evil if we keep a little fire on our hearths and in our souls, and welcome with open hand whatever of excellent come to warm itself, whether it be man or phantom, and do not say too fiercely, even to the dhouls themselves, ‘Be ye gone’? When all is said and done, how do we not know but that our own unreason may be better than another’s truth? For it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into the world again, wild bees, wild bees!”
“The Coming of Wisdom with Time”
“But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of the may,”
“But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of the may,”
“How far away the stars seem, and how far”
“Come away, O, human child!”
“It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is”
“What can be explained is not poetry.”
“The Coming of Wisdom with Time”
“But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of the may,”
“It was at the moment of the fall of day when every man may pass as handsome and every woman as comely.”
“I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.”
“I balanced all, brought all to mind,”
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“I sat, a solitary man,”
“I went out to the hazel wood”
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre”