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The old priest Peter Gilligan Was weary night and day For half his flock were in their beds, Or under green sods lay.
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
Flock
Bed
Green
Clergy
Half
Flocks
Night
Priest
Weary
Priests
Sod
Peter
Beds
Lays
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
William Butler Yeats
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.
William Butler Yeats
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still Go to the guards of the heavenly fold And bid them wander obeying your will, Flame under flame, till Time be no more.
William Butler Yeats
And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
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
For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.
William Butler Yeats
The unpurged images of day recede The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.
William Butler Yeats
It's certain there are trout somewhere - And maybe I shall take a trout - but I do not seem to care.
William Butler Yeats
And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.
William Butler Yeats
Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.
William Butler Yeats
I would have touched it like a child But knew my finger could but have touched Cold stone and water. I grew wild, Even accusing heaven because It had set down among its laws: Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch.
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
We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936
William Butler Yeats
What can be explained is not poetry.
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
. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death
William Butler Yeats
It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.
William Butler Yeats
Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die.
William Butler Yeats
The women that I picked spoke sweet and low And yet gave tongue. Hound voices were they all.
William Butler Yeats
But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.
William Butler Yeats
