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We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.

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
Life
Conceive
Tragedy
Begin
Live

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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I--love's skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb-- Shall leap into the light lost In my mother's womb.
William Butler Yeats
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Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
William Butler Yeats
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I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
William Butler Yeats
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The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
William Butler Yeats
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Because this age and the next age Engender in the ditch, No man can know a happy man From any passing wretch, If Folly link with Elegance No man knows which is which.
William Butler Yeats
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Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate, Know his work or choose his mate. Poet and sculptor, do the work, Nor let the modish painter shirk
William Butler Yeats
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What can I but enumerate old themes?
William Butler Yeats
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He Who is wrapped in purple robes, With planets in His care, Had pity on the least of things Asleep upon a chair.
William Butler Yeats
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but one loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.
William Butler Yeats
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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.
William Butler Yeats
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There is no release In a bodkin or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's dirty slate.
William Butler Yeats
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The hare grows old as she plays in the sun And gazes around her with eyes of brightness Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done She limps along in an aged whiteness.
William Butler Yeats
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And learn that the best thing is To change my loves while dancing And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
William Butler Yeats
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I long for truth, and yet I cannot stay from that My better self disowns, For a man's attention Brings such satisfaction To the craving in my bones.
William Butler Yeats
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All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
William Butler Yeats
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I pray-for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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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?
William Butler Yeats