Quote

Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance How can we know the dancer from the dance?

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
Born
Dancing
Glance
Brightening
Body
Despair
Leafs
Chestnut
Soul
Dance
Leaf
Chestnuts
Music
Labor
Glances
Swayed
Great
Tree
Midnight
Blossoming
Wisdom
Rooted
Bruised
Beauty
Dancer
Blossom
Pleasure
Oil
Eyed

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman's gaze.
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Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.
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This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
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Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
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The chief imagination of Christendom, Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself That he has made that hollow face of his More plain to the mind's eye than any face But that of Christ.
William Butler Yeats
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I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more.
William Butler Yeats
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Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.
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Only the dead can be forgiven But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
William Butler Yeats
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For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,”Here is the fiddler of Dooney!” / And dance like a wave of the sea.
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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.
William Butler Yeats
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All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake.
William Butler Yeats
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. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death
William Butler Yeats
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Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun.
William Butler Yeats
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Though logic-choppers rule the town, And every man and maid and boy Has marked a distant object down, An aimless joy is a pure joy.
William Butler Yeats
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When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
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Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul
William Butler Yeats
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My soul had found All happiness in its own cause or ground. Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot Godhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot Those amorous cries that out of quiet come And must the common round of day resume.
William Butler Yeats
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Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
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From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.
William Butler Yeats
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And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.
William Butler Yeats