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You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age They were not such a plague when I was young What else have I to spur me into song?

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
Spur
Upon
Spurs
Song
Plague
Else
Lust
Young
Rage
Think
Horrible
Thinking
Dance
Attention

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
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Ah, let us kiss each other's eyes,/And laugh our love away.
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The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.
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Life is a journey up a spiral staircase as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive we go both round and upward.
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Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.
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All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.
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Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams I have spread my dreams under your feet Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
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What can I but enumerate old themes?
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The Bishop has a skin, God knows, Wrinkled like the foot of a goose, (All find safety in the tomb.) Nor can he hide in holy black The heron's hunch upon his back, But a birch-tree stood my Jack.
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Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing. My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.
William Butler Yeats
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But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
William Butler Yeats
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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
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A man in his own secret meditation / Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / In art or politics.
William Butler Yeats
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What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?
William Butler Yeats
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What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons Do, but awake a hope to live...?
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Him who trembles before the flame and the flood, And the winds that blow through the starry ways, Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood Cover over and hide, for he has no part With the lonely, majestical multitude.
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.
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Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand.
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Let the new faces play what tricks they will In the old rooms night can outbalance day, Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, The living seem more shadowy than they.
William Butler Yeats