1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

If I make the lashes darkAnd the eyes more brightAnd the lips more scarlet,Or ask if all be rightFrom mirror after mirror,No vanity's displayed:I'm looking for the face I hadBefore the world was made.

All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.

The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.

All the stream that's roaring by Came out of a needle's eye....

Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye. What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher, Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.

Though leaves are many, the root is one.

I am content to live it all againAnd yet again, if it be life to pitchInto the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,A blind man battering blind men.

There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.

somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.