William Butler Yeats Beauty Quotations

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

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.

Land of Heart's Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

Time's bitter flood will rise, Your beauty perish and be lost For all eyes but these eyes.

Time's bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes.

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

All changed, changed utterly:A terrible beauty is born.

And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew....

But bear in mind your lover's wage Is what your looking-glass can show, And that he will turn green with rage At all that is not pictured there.

Tis the eternal law, That first in beauty should be first in might.

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

Time can but make her beauty over again.

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

O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman's gaze....

Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone....

And God would bid His warfare cease, Saying all things were well; And softly make a rosy peace, A peace of Heaven with Hell.

If Michael, leader of God's host When Heaven and Hell are met, Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post He would his deeds forget.

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, And Usna's children died.

Because of something told under the famished horn Of the hunter's moon, that hung between the night and the day, To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay, Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer.