Quote

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.

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
Create
Brush
Hand
Brushes
Whether
Pens
Half
Gentle
Upon
Sensitive
Nonchalance
Lost
Chosen
Chisel
Hands
Critics
Chisels
Mind
Losing
Lit

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All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.
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A speckled cat and a tame hare Eat at my hearthstone And sleep there And both look up to me alone For learning and defence As I look up to Providence.
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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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I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.
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Through winter-time we call on spring, And through the spring on summer call, And when the abounding hedges ring Declare that winter's best of all: And after that there's nothing good Because the spring time has not come- Not know that what disturbs our blood Is but its longing for the tomb.
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I know, although when looks meet I tremble to the bone, The more I leave the door unlatched The sooner love is gone.
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How can we know the dancer from the dance?
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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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But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.
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Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
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He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer.
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I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.
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When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.
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I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
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How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
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Where there is nothing, there is God.
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All hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will
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Education is not about filling a pail, it's about lighting a fire.
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We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.
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I am haunted by numberless islands, many a Danaan shore, Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no moreSoon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
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