1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick

Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.

I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.

Nothing that we love overmuch Is ponderable to our touch.

A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from his deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must needs think and think.

The last stroke of midnight dies.All day in the one chairFrom dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have rangedIn rambling talk with an image of air:Vague memories, nothing but memories.

Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.

May she be granted beauty and yet notBeauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,Being made beautiful overmuch,Consider beauty a sufficient end,Lose natural kindness and maybeThe heart-revealing intimacyThat chooses right, and never find a friend.

I--though heart might find relief Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief What seems most welcome in the tomb--play a predestined part. Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.