1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.

Jerome. That is a terribly wild thought. I hope you don’t believe all you say. Paul Ruttledge. Perhaps not. I only know that I want to upset everything about me. Have you not noticed that it is a complaint many of us have in this country? and whether it comes from love or hate I don’t know, they are so mixed together here.

O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary’s feet.

You who are bent, and bald, and blind, With a heavy heart and a wandering mind, Have known three centuries, poets sing, Of dalliance with a demon thing.

You have accused me of upsetting order by my free drinks, and I have showed you that there is a more dreadful fermentation in the Sermon on the Mount than in my beer-barrels. Christ thought it in the irresponsibility of His omnipotence.

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end...

The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there Stood in the circuit of a needle’s eye.

I don’t think the moral is good; and if any of you thuckeens go about imitating Anty in her laziness, you’ll find it won’t thrive with you as it did with her. She was beautiful beyond compare, which none of you are, and she had three powerful fairies to help her besides.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.