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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.
William Butler Yeats
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William Butler Yeats
Age: 73 †
Born: 1865
Born: June 13
Died: 1939
Died: January 28
Astrologer
Mystic
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Writer
Scrooby
Nottinghamshire
W. B. Yeats
William Yeats
W.B. Yeats
Looks
Sleep
Retirement
Take
Eyes
Soft
Eye
Gray
Nodding
Read
Slowly
Bending
Beautiful
Shadow
Overhead
Dream
Deep
Glowing
Look
Full
Nostalgia
Book
Fire
Shadows
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love
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Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
William Butler Yeats
A speckled cat and a tame hare Eat at my hearthstone And sleep there And both look up to me alone For learning and defence As I look up to Providence.
William Butler Yeats
Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye. What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher, Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.
William Butler Yeats
What do we know but that we face one another in this place?
William Butler Yeats
But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
William Butler Yeats
Locke sank into a swoon The Garden died God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.
William Butler Yeats
Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room.
William Butler Yeats
I have nothing more to give you than my heart. Spanish saying Hearts are not to be had as a gift hearts are to be earned.
William Butler Yeats
Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
William Butler Yeats
All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it
William Butler Yeats
I weave the shoes of Sorrow: Soundless shall be the footfall light In all men's ears of Sorrow, Sudden and light.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
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
William Butler Yeats
And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind, Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind: I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
William Butler Yeats
Myself I must remake.
William Butler Yeats
Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.
William Butler Yeats
I know of the leafy paths that the witches take Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool, And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake.
William Butler Yeats
What man does not understand, he fears and what he fears, he tends to destroy.
William Butler Yeats
