William Butler Yeats Quotes

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That's the way we live our lives.

The morning Sunne never lasts a day.

As leaves on the trees, such is the life of man.

Youth passes like a dream.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

Time flies never to be recalled.

Everything is fleeting and passing and impermanent in life. Relationships, people, our finite physical forms... We let go of our childhoods, we let go of different parts of our body, we lose elasticity in our skin, and we lose hair and we lose teeth.

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.

The brief span of our poor unhappy life to its final hour Is hastening on; and while we drink and call for gay wreaths, Perfumes, and young girls, old age creeps upon us, unperceived.

Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.

In this flowing stream, then, on which there is no abiding, what is there of the things which hurry by on which a man would set a high price? It would be just as if a man should fall in love with one of the sparrows which fly by, but it has already passed out of sight.

All things are subject to decay and change.

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

Nothing lasts forever but we always try, and I just can't help but wonder why we let it pass us by

We the mortals touch the metals, the wind, the ocean shores, the stones, knowing they will go on, inert or burning, and I was discovering, naming all the these things: it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

To venerate the simple days Which lead the seasons by, Needs but to remember That from you or I They may take the trifle Termed mortality!

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute...All the elements of life are in constant flight from us, with darkness and clarity intermingled, the vision and the eclipse; we look and hasten, reaching out our hands to clutch; every happening is a bend in the road...and suddenly we have grown old. We have a sense of shock and gathering darkness; ahead is a black doorway; the life that bore us is a flagging horse, and a veiled stranger is waiting in the shadows to unharness us.

Alas! the fleeting years, how they roll on!

Life is short but it is wide. This too shall pass.

Beauty never slumbers; All is in her name; But the rose remembers The dust from which it came.

But when to-morrow comes, yesterday's morrow will have been already spent: and lo! a fresh morrow will be for ever making away with our years, each just beyond our grasp.

Time touches all things with a destroying hand.