A shamrock has three leaves, so in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, here are three from my favorite Irish writer, William Butler Yeats:
“There is another world, but it is in this one.”
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
Yeats is so quotable that it is hard to only pick three. There are some people who, on being awarded the Nobel Prize, tarnish its respectability as a serious honor. (I’m looking at you, Bob Dylan.) There are others who should win it but never will. (Haruki Murakami, for instance.) Then there is Yeats, whose poetry inside his chest outshined even the Nobel medal laid upon it in 1923.
Yeats is one of those writers whose quotations you’ve almost certainly heard (probably several different ones) but never knew it was him. I don’t use quotes websites for This Beautiful Sentence because this segment is a place for me to single out passages that struck me while actually reading, but there is a good compilation at BrainyQuotes, and I’d be willing to bet you’ve come across at least a few. He has that singular quality among the wisest where what he says sounds so simple, so obvious that what he says seems to belong to all of us, but he was the one who thought to write it down.
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