William Butler Yeats Quotes

Though one were fair as roses His beauty clouds and closes.

Show me a mistress that is passing fair, what doth her beauty serve but as a note where I may read who pass'd that passing fair?

Tell me now in what hidden way isLady Flora the lovely Roman?Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais,Neither of them the fairer woman?Where is Echo, beheld of no man,Only heard on river and mere-She whose beauty was more than human?-But where are the snows of yester-year?

These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly, waking in the dawn of the morning, in the evening will be a pitiful frivolity, sleeping in the cold night's arms.

Beauty lasts five minutes. Maybe longer if you have a good plastic surgeon.

Beauty, unlike the rest of the gifts handed out at birth, does not require dedication, patience and hard work to pay off. But it's also the only gift that does not keep on giving.

Flowers are without hope. Because hope is tomorrow and flowers have no tomorrow.

Life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?

We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.

Faces that have charmed us the most escape us the soonest.

I think the best thing about a bubble is that it pops and is gone. That is what makes it so precious.

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; a shining gloss that fadeth suddenly; a flower that dies when it begins to bud; a doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, lost, faded, broken, dead within an hour.

To me, beauty and sadness are very closely linked. Truly beautiful things make me sad because I know they are going to fade. When I see a beautiful 20-year-old boy or girl-and they are breathtaking-I am filled with a kind of sadness. But maybe they are beautiful because we know they are not permanent and they are in a kind of transition.

Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

But beauty vanishes; beauty passes; However rare rare it be; And when I crumble, who will remember This lady of the West Country?

'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, But the joint force and full result of all.

... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.

The rose that lives its little hour Is prized beyone the sculpted flower.

Life was so short; so many beautiful things slipped away.

Every thing that grows / Holds in perfection but a little moment.

If I describe a sunny morning in May (the buds, the wet-winged flies, the warm sun and cool breeze), I am also implying the perishing quality of a morning in May, and a good description of May sets up the possibility of a May disaster.

Nothing gold can stay.

Because beautiful things never last. Not roses nor snow… And not fireworks, either

The head has the most beautiful appearance, as well as the highest station, in a human figure.