Quote

But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough And pressed at midnighht in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.

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
Character
Imagination
Solitary
Live
Public
Bed
Enough
Passion
Lips
Plummet
Love
Face
Girls
Beds
Faces
Youth
Pressed
Upon
Boys
Measured
Girl
Bring
Imagined
Place
Knew
Pale

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The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
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How can they know Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone, And there alone, that have no solitude? So the crowd come they care not what may come. They have loud music, hope every day renewed And heartier loves that lamp is from the tomb.
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Maybe the bride-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there...
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Time can but make her beauty over again.
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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!
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I long for truth, and yet I cannot stay from that My better self disowns, For a man's attention Brings such satisfaction To the craving in my bones.
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Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
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The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
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There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.
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I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.
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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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O heart, we are old The living beauty is for younger men: We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.
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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.
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When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.
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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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Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
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We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.
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Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
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