William Butler Yeats Quotes

When he is forsaken, Withered and shaken, What can an old man do but die?

Oh rage! Oh despair! Oh age, my enemy!

For death is not the worst, but when one wants to die and is not able even to have that.

A lot of people want to die for a lot of reasons.

Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.

Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.

I don't want to live beyond the age of 75. That would be a good point to bow out. I don't want to go on for ever.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

But a day must come when the fire of youth will be quenched in my veins, when winter will dwell in my heart, when his snow flakes will whiten my locks, and his mists will dim my eyes. Then my friends will lie in their lonely grave, and I alone will remain like a solitary stalk forgotten by the reaper.

I am sick of this way of life. The weariness and sadness of old age make it intolerable. I have walked with death in hand, and death's own hand is warmer than my own. I don't wish to live any longer.

To my ninth decade I have totter'd on, And no soft arm bends now my steps to steady; She, who once led me where she would, is gone, So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready.

This autumn- why am I growing old? bird disappearing among clouds.

"Oh to be old again," said a young corpse.

My joy is death- Death, at whose name I oft have been afeard, Because I wish'd this world's eternity.

To live when you do not want to is dreadful, but it would be even more terrible to be immortal when you did not want to be. As things are, however, the whole ghastly burden is suspended from me by a thread which I can cut in two with a penny-knife.

I want nothing but death.

It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.

At my age, I regard each funeral I attend as a personal triumph, because I was not the guest of honor.

Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die.

I've had a good run of birthdays, and now no one will notice when I die.

when you are old and realize that time is running out, you start imagining that you have the cure for all the ills of the world in your hand, and get frustrated because no one pays you any attention.

There are moments of despair that come sometimes, when night sets in and a white fog presses against the windows. Then our house changes its shape, rears up and becomes a place of despair. Then fear and rage run simply--and the thought of Death as a friend. This is the simplest of thoughts, that Death must come when we call, although he is a god.