Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
William Butler Yeats
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Soul
Passing
Sometimes
London
Whiff
Feels
Air
Londoners
Like
Streets
Perpetually
Walk
Compelled
Walks
Melancholy
Imagine
Passings
Lost
Souls
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
But bear in mind your lover's wage Is what your looking-glass can show, And that he will turn green with rage At all that is not pictured there.
William Butler Yeats
For what but eye and ear silence the mind With the minute particulars of mankind?
William Butler Yeats
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
William Butler Yeats
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
William Butler Yeats
A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
William Butler Yeats
There is another world, but it is in this one.
William Butler Yeats
...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... When You Are Old And Gray
William Butler Yeats
It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.
William Butler Yeats
Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.
William Butler Yeats
It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.
William Butler Yeats
Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power.
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
The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.
William Butler Yeats
A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him up for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.
William Butler Yeats
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?
William Butler Yeats
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
William Butler Yeats
The women take so little stock In what I do or say They'd sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray.
William Butler Yeats
Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.
William Butler Yeats
