Quote

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.

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
Men
Refuse
Life
Perfection
Mansion
Choose
Raging
Second
Mansions
Dark
Heavenly
Take
Forced
Must
Rage
Work
Intellect

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I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.
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Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while.
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I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
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And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
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The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.
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Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.
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Let the new faces play what tricks they will In the old rooms night can outbalance day, Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, The living seem more shadowy than they.
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Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
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I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes.
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For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon.
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Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.
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Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.
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somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
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Time can but make her beauty over again.
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The Muse is mute when public men Applaud a modern throne.
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True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
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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.
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My chair was nearest to the fire In every company That talked of love or politics, Ere Time transfigured me.
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We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
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For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
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