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Nor bird nor beast Could make me wish for anything this day, Being old, but that the old alone might die, And that would be against God's Providence.

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
Anything
Might
Providence
Make
Beast
Would
Aging
Bird
Alone
Dies
Wish

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
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I knew that I had seen, had seen at last That girl my unremembering nights hold fast Or else my dreams that fly If I should rub an eye, And yet in flying fling into my meat A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat.
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BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there.
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I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind, I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had, But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind I ran, I ran, from my love's side because my Heart went mad.
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When we are high and airy hundreds say That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place, While those same hundreds mock another day Because we have made our art of common things.
William Butler Yeats
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Laughter not time destroyed my voice And put that crack in it, And when the moon's pot-bellied I get a laughing fit.
William Butler Yeats
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We are fastened to a dying animal.
William Butler Yeats
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Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.
William Butler Yeats
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Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
William Butler Yeats
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Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.
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The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
William Butler Yeats
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That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations-at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child's laughter, a woman's kiss.
William Butler Yeats
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Though I have many words, What woman's satisfied, I am no longer faint Because at her side? O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?
William Butler Yeats
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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
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What the world's million lips are searching for, must be substantial somewhere.
William Butler Yeats
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Maybe the bride-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there...
William Butler Yeats
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A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
William Butler Yeats
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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