William Butler Yeats Quotes

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

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.

Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

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

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

A frail gift is beauty, which grows less as time draws on, and is devoured by its own years.

Most long lives resemble those threads of gossamer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly prolonged, scarce visible pathways of some worm from his cradle to his grave.

Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal. All beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with marvelous rapidity; beautiful Helen of Troy has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing.

Prettiness dies first.

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.

Time is not kind to everything.

All that's bright must fade, The brightest still the fleetest; All that's sweet was made But to be lost when sweetest.

Time's stern tide, with cold Oblivion's wave, Shall soon dissolve each fair, each fading charm.

Time is the devourer of all things.

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

How terrible a thing time is.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

Dust, in the end, settles on everything.

Nothing grows old faster than the new.

You think about it sometimes. I try not to think about it too much. You think about you can't play forever.

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.

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.

Death devours all lovely things.