1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! Wine shall run thick to the end, Bread taste sour.

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.

All changed, changed utterly:A terrible beauty is born.

But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough And pressed at midnighht in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.

A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.

I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.

Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveler; he Served human liberty.

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.