W B Yeats Quotes

“Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O Never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.”
― W. B. Yeats, In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age

“It is always reassuring to discover that great writers are as fallible as oneself. W.B. Yeats once failed to obtain an academic post in Dublin because he misspelt the word ‘professor’ on his application.”
― Terry Eagleton, How to Read Literature

“For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.”
― Kathleen Raine

“Fiona MacLeod! There will ever be a grain of bitterness in my acknowledgement of him, or of Yeats, or of any of the modern Celtic twilighters, an irritable impatience of their pale fancies, their posturing sonorities and follies. Yet on a certain side they are 'getting' me, and sometimes a phrase, a thought, has positively uncanny, mesmeric power over my very flesh.

This sort of dream poetry is clearly a drug, and of the most insidious... Then poetry casts its net, its iridescent net, and the silvery fish of intellect is meshed in the music of lost days and beauties forgone.”
― Neil M. Gunn, Half-Light

“It is impossible to understand Crowley. unless we grasp that, like Madame Blavatsky and Mathers and Yeats and Florence Farr, he took magic as seriously as Lord Rutherford took atomic physics. Literary commentators often make the same mistake about Yeats: that he regarded magic as a romantic exercise in suspension of disbelief. Yeat's [sic] magical notebooks reveal this to have been untrue; they go into overwhelming detail about magical procedures and symbols and show that he continued to be obsessed by it long after he ceased to be a member of the Golden Dawn.”
― Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast

“Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”
― W.B. Yeats