Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Lasts
Condense
Last
Vapor
Art
Endeavor
Human
Analysis
Humans
Flying
World
Image
Perfection
Sake

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

Image
He Who is wrapped in purple robes, With planets in His care, Had pity on the least of things Asleep upon a chair.
William Butler Yeats
Image
And if joy were not on the earth, There were an end of change and birth, And Earth and Heaven and Hell would die, And in some gloomy barrow lie Folded like a frozen fly.
William Butler Yeats
Image
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
William Butler Yeats
Image
True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
William Butler Yeats
Image
When we have blamed the wind we can blame love.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Maybe the bride-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there...
William Butler Yeats
Image
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
William Butler Yeats
Image
The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
William Butler Yeats
Image
There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Myself I must remake.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.
William Butler Yeats
Image
... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.
William Butler Yeats
Image
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.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted, Their heads being turned with praise and flattery And that is why their lovers are afraid To tell them a plain story.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young / And weep because I know all things now.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I--love's skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb-- Shall leap into the light lost In my mother's womb.
William Butler Yeats