MondayOct 19, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.
What shall I do for pretty girls Now my old bawd is dead?
We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936
Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance.
Now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Nothing that we love overmuch Is ponderable to our touch.
No man has ever lived that had enough Of children's gratitude or woman's love.
Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Hands, do what you're bid: Bring the balloon of the mind That bellies and drags in the wind Into its narrow shed.
Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire.
Come let us mock at the great That had such burdens on the mind And toiled so hard and late To leave some monument behind, Nor thought of the leveling wind.
Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
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. The years like great black oxen tread the world And God the herdsman goads them on behind And I am broken by their passing feet.
See T. S. Eliot, Yeats the Poet and W. H. Auden, Yeats the Poet
Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
Words alone are certain good.
Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun Now I may wither into the truth.
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.
Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans.
But what is Whiggery? A leveling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of a drunkard's eye.
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.
When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face. And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. When you are Old.
The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.
Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?
Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air; Their hearts have not grown old.
The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.
I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear.
To the waters, and the wild, with a Faerie, hand in hand, for the world is more full of weeping ... than you can understand.
I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.
Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
He that sings a lasting song Thinks in a marrowbone.
The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.... I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance the revolt of the soul against the intellect.
Down the mountain walls From where Pan's cavern is Intolerable music falls. Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam.
The Mask 'Put off that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes.' 'O no, my dear, you make so bold To find if hearts be wild and wise, And yet not cold.' 'I would but find what's there to find, Love or deceit.' 'It was the mask engaged your mind, And after set your heart to beat, Not what's behind.' 'But lest you are my enemy, I must enquire.' 'O no, my dear, let all that be, What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me?'
Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?
Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass Alone, important and wise, And lifts to the changing moon His changing eyes. The Wild Swans at Coole 1919. The Cat and the Moon
My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.
Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveler; he Served human liberty.
'The sun in a golden cup' ... though not 'the moon in a silver bag,' is a quotation from the last of Mr. Ezra Pound's Cantos.W. B. YEATS
I carry the sun in a golden cup, The moon in a silver bag.
Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead ... That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant.
Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room.
What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms?
Consume my heart away, sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is, and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.
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; My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor.
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious moodsex and the dead.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat.
Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?
O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.
The friends that have it I do wrong When ever I remake a song Should know what issue is at stake, It is myself that I remake.
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways.
Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.
If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.
Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.
I see my life go drifting like a river From change to change; I have been many things A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light Upon a sword, a fir tree on a hill, An old slave grinding at a heavy quern, A king sitting upon a chair of gold And all these things were wonderful and great; But now I have grown nothing, knowing all. Ah! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow Lay hidden in that small slate-coloured thing!
Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.
Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry.
Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.
An old man's eagle mind.
Pardon, old fathers.
When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book.
Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?
The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
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.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping Than you can understand.
Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world, and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
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.
Now that my ladders gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Think where man's glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.
Things said or done long years ago Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.
Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to 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.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.
One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain. Because the mountain grass Cannot keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain.
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
You think it horrible that lust and rage Should 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?
How many loved your moments of glad grace And loved your beauty with love false or true But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
If soul my look and body touch, Which is the more blest?
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds.
And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
And I may dine at journey's end With Landor and with Donne.
Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made.
An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?
The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned; Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned.
I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.
An intellectual hate is the worst.
All hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will
The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.
Cast a cold eye On life, on death Horseman, pass by!
We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.
I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes But when this soul, its body off Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows.
John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.
Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul,' I cried. 'My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied.'
I prayfor fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.
O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.
Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave of the sea.
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees Those dying generationsat their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.
The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet Tread softly because you tread on n dreams.
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
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 hear it in the deep heart's core.
On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.
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.
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. r
I heard the old, old men say 'All that's beautiful drifts away Like the waters.'
At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit.
If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon The golden apples of the sun.
Fifteen apparitions have I seen; The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.
An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress.
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies, For all their broomsticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.
It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's though Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones.'
For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.
I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.
A pity beyond all telling Is hid in the heart of love.
A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
What shall I do with this absurdity O heart, O troubled heartthis caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible.
In dreams begin responsibility.
A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.
O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
No art can conquer the people alonethe people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.
But is there any comfort to be found? Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?
What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
In dreams begins responsibility.
He knows death to the bone - Man has created death.
Why should not old men be mad?
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
O heart, we are old; The living beauty is for younger men: We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.
But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
Those dancing days are gone.
That is no country for old men.
The fury and the mire of human veins.
What shall I do with this absurdity - O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail?
Wine come 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 have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul.
One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
Terms of use and copyrights
