Quote

Speech after long silence it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead . . . That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom young We loved each other and were ignorant.

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
Long
Dead
Estranged
Loved
Bodily
Wisdom
Theme
Upon
Ignorant
Song
Supreme
Art
Lovers
Young
Speech
Right
Silence
Decrepitude

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! Wine shall run thick to the end, Bread taste sour.
William Butler Yeats
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Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.
William Butler Yeats
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We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
William Butler Yeats
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All that could run or leap or swim Whether in wood, water or cloud, Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him.
William Butler Yeats
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When we have blamed the wind we can blame love.
William Butler Yeats
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Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
William Butler Yeats
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There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings.
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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...How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face... When You Are Old And Gray
William Butler Yeats
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I had this thought a while ago, My darling cannot understand What I have done, or what would do In this blind bitter land. And I grew weary of the sun
William Butler Yeats
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O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
William Butler Yeats
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Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.
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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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
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But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
William Butler Yeats
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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.
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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When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.
William Butler Yeats
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Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.
William Butler Yeats
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It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.
William Butler Yeats