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We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936
William Butler Yeats
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William Butler Yeats
Age: 73 †
Born: 1865
Born: June 13
Died: 1939
Died: January 28
Astrologer
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Poet
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Scrooby
Nottinghamshire
W. B. Yeats
William Yeats
W.B. Yeats
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Olivia
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There's many a one shall find out all heartache On finding that her voice is sweet and low Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know- Although they do not talk of it at school - That we must labor to be beautiful.
William Butler Yeats
For what but eye and ear silence the mind With the minute particulars of mankind?
William Butler Yeats
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
William Butler Yeats
I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.
William Butler Yeats
Laughter not time destroyed my voice And put that crack in it, And when the moon's pot-bellied I get a laughing fit.
William Butler Yeats
For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.
William Butler Yeats
What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
William Butler Yeats
Some burn damp faggots, others may consume The entire combustible world in one small room.
William Butler Yeats
I weave the shoes of Sorrow: Soundless shall be the footfall light In all men's ears of Sorrow, Sudden and light.
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
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
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.
William Butler Yeats
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.
William Butler Yeats
Man's life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality.
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
I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem.
William Butler Yeats
I knew that I had seen, had seen at last That girl my unremembering nights hold fast Or else my dreams that fly If I should rub an eye, And yet in flying fling into my meat A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat.
William Butler Yeats
The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
William Butler Yeats
. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death
William Butler Yeats
Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.
William Butler Yeats
