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

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

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

Image
O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.
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
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
Image
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations-at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.
William Butler Yeats
Image
By logic and reason we die hourly by imagination we live.
William Butler Yeats
Image
We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.
William Butler Yeats
Image
There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Things fall apart the center cannot hold.
William Butler Yeats
Image
In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class.
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
It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.
William Butler Yeats
Image
For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.
William Butler Yeats
Image
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
William Butler Yeats
Image
only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?
William Butler Yeats
Image
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams.
William Butler Yeats