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Poetry and music I have banished, But the stupidity Of root, shoot, blossom or clay Makes no demand. I bend my body to the spade Or grope with a dirty hand.
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
Hand
Shoot
Grope
Makes
Stupidity
Spade
Hands
Dirty
Banished
Body
Roots
Spades
Music
Musician
Blossom
Demand
Bend
Poet
Clay
Poetry
Root
More quotes by 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
We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.
William Butler Yeats
From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.
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
All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
William Butler Yeats
The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
William Butler Yeats
This great purple butterfly, In the prison of my hands, Has a learning in his eye Not a poor fool understands.
William Butler Yeats
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
now I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
William Butler Yeats
Time can but make it easier to be wise / Though now it seems impossible, and so / All that you need is patience.
William Butler Yeats
What can be explained is not poetry.
William Butler Yeats
Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.
William Butler Yeats
Speech after long silence it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead . . . That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom young We loved each other and were ignorant.
William Butler Yeats
What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?
William Butler Yeats
Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.
William Butler Yeats
Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
William Butler Yeats
An intellectual hatred is the worst.
William Butler Yeats
My chair was nearest to the fire In every company That talked of love or politics, Ere Time transfigured me.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
William Butler Yeats
