Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

Image
Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.
William Butler Yeats
Image
A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
William Butler Yeats
Image
My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day's war with every knave and dolt, Theater business, management of men.
William Butler Yeats
Image
It's certain there are trout somewhere - And maybe I shall take a trout - but I do not seem to care.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I have found nothing half so good / As my long-planned half solitude, / Where I can sit up half the night / With some friend that has the wit.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?
William Butler Yeats
Image
How can they know Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone, And there alone, that have no solitude? So the crowd come they care not what may come. They have loud music, hope every day renewed And heartier loves that lamp is from the tomb.
William Butler Yeats
Image
The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Come let us mock at the great That had such burdens on the mind And toiled so hard and late To leave some monument behind, Nor thought of the leveling wind.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay
William Butler Yeats
Image
I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
William Butler Yeats
Image
The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.
William Butler Yeats
Image
If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.
William Butler Yeats
Image
The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.
William Butler Yeats
Image
How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?
William Butler Yeats
Image
On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand lifted up that blest And right between these two a girl at play That, it may be, had danced her life away.
William Butler Yeats
Image
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
Image
O would, beloved, that you lay Under the dock-leaves in the ground, While lights were paling one by one.
William Butler Yeats