1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,Amid the rustle of his planted hills,Life overflows without ambitious pains;And rains down life until the basin spills,And mounts more dizzy high the more it rainsAs though to choose whatever shape it wills. . . .

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings...

I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'

To sit beside the board and drink good wine And watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire And feel content and wisdom in your heart, This is the best of life; when we are young We long to tread a way none trod before, But find the excellent old way through love And through the care of children to the hour Forbidding Fate and Time and Change goodbye.

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

for never yet Has lover lived, but longed to wive Like them that are no more alive.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.