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No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
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
Many
Woven
Writing
Lands
Even
Shakespeare
Men
Thread
Perfectly
Land
Though
Threads
Write
Spun
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
For wisdom is the property of the dead, A something incompatible with life and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood, A property of the living but no stain Can come upon the visage of the moon When it has looked in glory from a cloud.
William Butler Yeats
Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.
William Butler Yeats
Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire, With your harmonious choir Encircle her I love and sing her into peace, That my old care may cease.
William Butler Yeats
Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.
William Butler Yeats
Why should I seek for love or study it? It is of God and passes human wit I study hatred with great diligence, For that's a passion in my own control, A sort of besom that can clear the soul Of everything that is not mind or sense.
William Butler Yeats
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.
William Butler Yeats
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
William Butler Yeats
How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there's a politician That has read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!
William Butler Yeats
Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.
William Butler Yeats
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
No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.
William Butler Yeats
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
In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class.
William Butler Yeats
It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike.
William Butler Yeats
... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.
William Butler Yeats
It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.
William Butler Yeats
Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye. What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher, Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.
William Butler Yeats
His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
William Butler Yeats
Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
William Butler Yeats
