WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS QUOTES V

Irish poet (1865-1939)

The most celebrated fairy doctors are sometimes people the fairies loved and carried away, and kept with them for seven years; not that those the fairies love are always carried off--they may merely grow silent and strange, and take to lonely wanderings in the "gentle" places.

W. B. YEATS

"Witches, Fairy Doctors", Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry

Tags: fairies


The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

letter to Frederick J. Gregg, summer, 1886


Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

"Never Give All the Heart", In the Seven Woods


No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Ideas of Good and Evil


A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

"The Pity of Love", The Rose


Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

"Sailing to Byzantium", The Tower


I had no natural gift for this clear quiet, as I soon discovered, for my mind is abnormally restless; and I was seldom delighted by that sudden luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of oneself that one is merely imagining. I therefore invented a new process. I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full of light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams during sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of the confusion of dreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or leaves.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

"Anima Mundi", Per Amica Silentia Lunae


God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

"A Prayer for Old Age", A Full Moon in March

Tags: thought


Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from Lethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word -- ecstasy.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae


I had thought for no one's but your ears;
That you were beautiful and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary hearted as that hollow moon.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

"Adam's Curse", In the Seven Woods


Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Ideas of Good and Evil