William Butler Yeats Quotes

The fear of old age is something that one feels when they're younger. Once you get to being old, you're already there, so you don't even think about it anymore.

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.

I've gotten to the age where I'm comfortable with just about everything - except getting old!

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

To grow up requires a whole life but to become old one night is enough.

Night will always be a time of fear and insecurity, and the heart will sink with the sun.

Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.

I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.

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.

No mortal man could frighten him, no more than the darkness could, nor the bones of his soul, the grey and grisly bones of his soul.

The light of a new day always chases the shadows of the night away, and shows us that the shape of our fears is only the ghost of our own minds.

One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don't so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it's time to be on my way. No, it's the snickering that gets me down.

My heart's dark, but it's rising. I'm pulling all the faith I can see.

To hope is to see with the eye of the heart. To hope is to make the heart captain the vital and the body. To hope is to send darkness-night into exile.

It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.

Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.

Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.

Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.

Neither lemonade nor anything else can prevent the inroads of old age. At present, I am stoical under its advances, and hope I shall remain so. I have but one prayer at heart; and that is, to have my faculties so far preserved that I can be useful, in some way or other, to the last.

Night has patterns that can be read less by the living than by the dead.

In every winter's heart there is a quivering spring, and behind the veil of each night there is a shining dawn.

Enjoy the blessing of strength while you have it and do not bewail it when it is gone, unless, forsooth, you believe that youth must lament the loss of infancy, or early manhood the passing of youth. Life's race-course is fixed; Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once, and to each stage of existence has been allotted its own appropriate quality; so that the weakness of childhood, the impetuosity of youth, the seriousness of middle life, the maturity of old age.. each bears some of Nature's fruit, which must be garnered in its own season.