The Celtic Twilight

The W.B. Yeats edition

Photo by Josh Felise on Unsplash

“Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked -- and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.”
― W.B. Yeats

“A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard
A voice singing on a May Eve like this,
And followed half awake and half asleep,
Until she came into the Land of Faery,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
And she is still there, busied with a dance
Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood,
Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top.”
― William Butler Yeats

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”
― W.B. Yeats

“Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

“Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all.”
― William Butler Yeats

“But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I lay them at your feet. Tread lightly, for you tread on my dreams.”
― William Butler Yeats

“I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked”
― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.”
― W. B. Yeats

“We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother, sister of the next. Sometimes, however, a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and again.”
― W. B. Yeats

“The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.”
― William Butler Yeats, Easter 1916 and Other Poems

“Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

“The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.”
― William Butler Yeats

“To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart”
― William Butler Yeats

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep”
― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

“We can only begin to live when we conceive life as
Tragedy.”
― William Butler Yeats

“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield”
― William Butler Yeats

“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”
― W.B. Yeats

“People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. ”
― William Butler Yeats

“Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.”
― W.B. Yeats

“It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is”
― W.B. Yeats

“The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.”
― W.B. Yeats

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