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For how can you compete Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbour's eyes?
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
Eyes
Bred
Lying
Neighbour
Eye
Proved
Compete
Honour
Atheism
Neither
Lies
Shamed
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. I thirst for accusation. All that was sung. All that was said in Ireland is a lie Breed out of the contagion of the throng, Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.
William Butler Yeats
Life is a journey up a spiral staircase as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive we go both round and upward.
William Butler Yeats
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
William Butler Yeats
So long as all is ordered for attack, and that alone, leaders will instinctively increase the number of enemies that they may give their followers something to do.
William Butler Yeats
What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
William Butler Yeats
All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.
William Butler Yeats
The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all
William Butler Yeats
Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
William Butler Yeats
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
A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
William Butler Yeats
God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.
William Butler Yeats
Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade.
William Butler Yeats
A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade, Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out. It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
William Butler Yeats
If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.
William Butler Yeats
All think what other people think All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?
William Butler Yeats
There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.
William Butler Yeats
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
William Butler Yeats
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
In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.
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
