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An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick

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
Age
Paltry
Upon
Aged
Thing
Coat
Men
Elderly
Time
Coats
Stick
Aging
Byzantium
Sticks
Tattered

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade, Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out. It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
William Butler Yeats
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Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?
William Butler Yeats
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The Muse is mute when public men Applaud a modern throne.
William Butler Yeats
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats
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You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon Ireland's history in their lineaments trace think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.
William Butler Yeats
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I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.
William Butler Yeats
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In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
William Butler Yeats
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And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew.
William Butler Yeats
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Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
William Butler Yeats
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Though I have many words, What woman's satisfied, I am no longer faint Because at her side? O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?
William Butler Yeats
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Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain- beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering.
William Butler Yeats
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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
William Butler Yeats
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The women take so little stock In what I do or say They'd sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray.
William Butler Yeats
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Who mocks at music mocks at love.
William Butler Yeats
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A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon I hail the superhuman I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
William Butler Yeats
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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. . . .
William Butler Yeats
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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
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Cuchulain stirred, Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard The cars of battle and his own name cried And fought with the invulnerable tide.
William Butler Yeats
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But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good.
William Butler Yeats
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Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.
William Butler Yeats