Quote

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

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
Life
Loses
Aging
Grows
Begins
Hands
Fruit
Dream
Older
Care
Flower
Take
Loss
Great
Dreams
Lightness
Something
Perhaps
Retirement

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

Image
O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.
William Butler Yeats
Image
If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.
William Butler Yeats
Image
The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.
William Butler Yeats
Image
For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told your character: Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams
William Butler Yeats
Image
In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.
William Butler Yeats
Image
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.
William Butler Yeats
Image
How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there's a politician That has read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!
William Butler Yeats
Image
I am haunted by numberless islands, many a Danaan shore, Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no moreSoon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
William Butler Yeats
Image
Maybe the bride-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there...
William Butler Yeats
Image
on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.
William Butler Yeats
Image
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
William Butler Yeats
Image
When all is said and done, how do we know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey.
William Butler Yeats
Image
We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.
William Butler Yeats
Image
When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on.
William Butler Yeats
Image
We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.
William Butler Yeats