1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

Time drops in decay, Like a candle burnt out, And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day;

Bid imagination run / Much on the Great Questioner; / What He can question, what if questioned I / Can with a fitting confidence reply.

I weave the shoes of Sorrow: Soundless shall be the footfall light In all men's ears of Sorrow, Sudden and light.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

A man in his own secret meditation / Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / In art or politics.

His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.

Those images that yetFresh images beget,That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

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.