1,059 Quotes by 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.

Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone.

O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze...

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place...

I would that there was nothing in the world But my beloved that night and day had perished, And all that is and all that is to be, All that is not the meeting of our lips.

I agree about Shaw – he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.

Florence Farr once said to me, If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, ‘this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know,’ we could die upon the instant and be united with God.

All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art’s sake.

But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good.