Quote

On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand lifted up that blest And right between these two a girl at play That, it may be, had danced her life away.

William Butler Yeats

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Girl
Breasts
Paws
Away
Suddenly
Danced
Hands
Rock
Lifted
Two
Rocks
Lion
May
Saws
Buddha
Play
Rest
Breast
Right
Hand
Grey
Sphinx
Life
Woman
Lions
Blest

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

Image
Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.
William Butler Yeats
Image
You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon Ireland's history in their lineaments trace think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
William Butler Yeats
Image
...How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face... When You Are Old And Gray
William Butler Yeats
Image
Tis the eternal law, That first in beauty should be first in might.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind, That loved his learning better than mankind, Though courteous to the worst much falling he Brooded upon sanctity.
William Butler Yeats
Image
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Many times man lives and dies between his two eternities: that of race and that of Soul... A brief parting from those dear is the worst man has to fear... Though grave diggers' toil is long... They but thrust their buried men back in the human mind again.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I bear a burden that might well try Men that do all by rule, And what can I That am a wandering-witted fool But pray to God that He ease My great responsibilities?
William Butler Yeats
Image
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
William Butler Yeats
Image
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam, Our arms are waving, our lips are apart.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I have nothing more to give you than my heart. Spanish saying Hearts are not to be had as a gift hearts are to be earned.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.
William Butler Yeats
Image
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Come swish around my pretty punk And keep me dancing still That I may stay a sober man Although I drink my fill.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
William Butler Yeats
Image
It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul, I cried. My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied.
William Butler Yeats
Image
For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
William Butler Yeats