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A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
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
Good
Citizen
Turned
Poet
Citizens
Inside
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
In dreams begins responsibility.
William Butler Yeats
We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity.
William Butler Yeats
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
Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul, I cried. My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied.
William Butler Yeats
And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
William Butler Yeats
Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.
William Butler Yeats
One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
William Butler Yeats
What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There's better exercise In the sunlight and wind.
William Butler Yeats
I broke my heart in two So hard I struck. What matter? for I know That out of rock, Out of a desolate source, Love leaps upon its course.
William Butler Yeats
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
William Butler Yeats
An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?
William Butler Yeats
How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?
William Butler Yeats
Now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats
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
Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. I thirst for accusation. All that was sung. All that was said in Ireland is a lie Breed out of the contagion of the throng, Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.
William Butler Yeats
You ask what I have found and far and wide I go, Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew, The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay, And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen where are they?
William Butler Yeats
somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
William Butler Yeats
Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted, Their heads being turned with praise and flattery And that is why their lovers are afraid To tell them a plain story.
William Butler Yeats
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
Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire, With your harmonious choir Encircle her I love and sing her into peace, That my old care may cease.
William Butler Yeats
