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THOUGH you are in your shining days, Voices among the crowd And new friends busy with your praise, Be not unkind or proud, But think about old friends the most: Time's bitter flood will rise, Your beauty perish and be lost For all eyes but these eyes.

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
Friends
Busy
Perish
Eye
Praise
Flood
Voice
Among
Voices
Lost
Proud
Crowd
Time
Days
Crowds
Think
Beauty
Bitter
Thinking
Eyes
Rise
Though
Shining
Unkind

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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When we have blamed the wind we can blame love.
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A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought.
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I have no question: It is enough, I know what fixed the station Of star and cloud. And knowing all, I cry. . . .
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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
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I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made.
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Laughter not time destroyed my voice And put that crack in it, And when the moon's pot-bellied I get a laughing fit.
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Acquaintance companion One dear brilliant woman The best-endowed, the elect, All by their youth undone, All, all, by that inhuman Bitter glory wrecked.
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No man has ever lived that had enough of children's gratitude or woman's love.
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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.
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Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil
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Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
William Butler Yeats
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I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?
William Butler Yeats
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If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf
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.
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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?
William Butler Yeats
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Between extremities Man runs his course A brand, or flaming breath, Comes to destroy All those antinomies Of day and night.
William Butler Yeats
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Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.
William Butler Yeats
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Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.
William Butler Yeats
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Overcome the Empyrean hurl Heaven and Earth out of their places, That in the same calamity Brother and brother, friend and friend, Family and family, City and city may contend.
William Butler Yeats
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I have mummy truths to tell Whereat the living mock, Though not for sober ear, For maybe all that hear Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.
William Butler Yeats