William Butler Yeats Beautiful Quotations

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.

When you are old and gray 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.

To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.

May she be granted beauty and yet notBeauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,Being made beautiful overmuch,Consider beauty a sufficient end,Lose natural kindness and maybeThe heart-revealing intimacyThat chooses right, and never find a friend.

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end....

It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.

THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There's many a one shall find out all heartache On finding that her voice is sweet and low Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know- Although they do not talk of it at school - That we must labor to be beautiful.

I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away....the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even spoken to them.

For such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend. r

My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd. "This Land of Saints," and then as the applause died out, "Of plaster Saints;" his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.

All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.