50 Quotes by W.B. Yeats

A lonely impulse of delight

Never shall a young man,Thrown into despairBy those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear,Love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."(Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven)

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.

What can be explained is not poetry.

I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.

I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behindIn balance with this life, this death.