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When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.

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
Think
Read
Scales
Thinking
Words
Preparation
Life
Given
Anxiety
Happens
Parents
Weighed
Seems
Wise
Grandparents
Book
Parent
Grandparent
Something
Heard
Spoken
Never
Books
Hopes

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Acquaintance companion One dear brilliant woman The best-endowed, the elect, All by their youth undone, All, all, by that inhuman Bitter glory wrecked.
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O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.
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When two close kindred meet What better than call a dance?.
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All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.
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A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought.
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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
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May we two stand, When we are dead, beyond the setting suns, A little from other shades apart, With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.
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The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.
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A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.
William Butler Yeats
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O heart, we are old The living beauty is for younger men: We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.
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All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it
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Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
William Butler Yeats
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On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand lifted up that blest And right between these two a girl at play That, it may be, had danced her life away.
William Butler Yeats
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What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
William Butler Yeats
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There is another world, but it is in this one.
William Butler Yeats
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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.
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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
William Butler Yeats
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Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
William Butler Yeats
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Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
William Butler Yeats
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... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.
William Butler Yeats