W. B. Yeats

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

“I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

“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...”

“The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouche...”

“What can be explained is not poetry.”

“I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.”

“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”

“I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more...”

“When You Are Old 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 shadow...”

“How far away the stars seem, and how far Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!”

“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”

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

“Is this my dream, or the truth? O would that we had met When I had my burning youth; But I grow old among dreams, A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams.”

“As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the fu...”