Quotes from yeats william butler iii

The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.

For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.

The old women are most learned, but will not so readily be got to talk, for the fairies are very secretive, and much resent being talked of; and are there not many stories of old women who were nearly pinched into their graves or numbed with fairy blasts?

When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.

I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.

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.

This melancholy London -- I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.

I call to the mysterious one who yet Shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge, And look most like me, being indeed my double, And prove of all imaginable things The most unlike, being my anti-self, And, standing by these characters, disclose All that I seek; and whisper it as though He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud Their momentary cries before it is dawn, Would carry it away to blasphemous men.

It was a profound understanding of all creatures and things, a profound sympathy with passionate and lost souls, made possible in their extreme intensity by his revolt against corporeal law, and corporeal reason, which made Blake the one perfectly fit illustrator for the Inferno and the Purgatorio.

Though leaves are many, the root is one.

When all is said and done, how do we know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey.

Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell And many a lesser bell sound through the room; And it is All Soul's Night, And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come; For it is a ghost's right, 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.

I would be -- for no knowledge is worth a straw -- Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.

It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.

I agree about Shaw -- he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.

The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who live with it.