1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,The heart's grown brutal from the fare.

I know, although when looks meet I tremble to the bone, The more I leave the door unlatched The sooner love is gone....

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

Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.

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.

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.