Famous quotes containing the words william butler yeats, butler yeats, william butler, william, butler and/or yeats:
“But there’s another knowledge that my heart destroys
As the fox in the old fable destroyed the Spartan boy’s
Because it proves that things both can and cannot be;
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company;
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their servant though all are underground.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“So the Platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Go! climb that rock, and when thou there hast found
A star, contracted in a diamond,”
—Sir William Davenant (1606–1668)
“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.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“That country where a man can be so crossed;
Can be so battered, badgered and destroyed
That he’s a loveless man....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)