Quote

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place.

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
Upon
Tombs
Never
Text
Enquiring
Men
Living
Chose
Stony
Life
Comes
Isolation
Nightfall
World
Next
Apart
Rested
Place
John
Desolate
Certain
Towards
Tomb
Come
Dying
Travelling
Long

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.
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Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains As though to choose whatever shape it wills.
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For what but eye and ear silence the mind With the minute particulars of mankind?
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Myself I must remake.
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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?
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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.
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And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
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Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
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Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.
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I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self.
William Butler Yeats
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Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul
William Butler Yeats
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I am haunted by numberless islands, many a Danaan shore, Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no moreSoon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
William Butler Yeats
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All men live in suffering I know as few can know, Whether they take the upper road Or stay content on the low.
William Butler Yeats
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but one loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.
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What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?
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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.
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An age is the reversal of an age: When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone, We lived like men that watch a painted stage. What matter for the scene, the scene once gone: It had not touched our lives.
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O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.
William Butler Yeats
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All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it
William Butler Yeats