William Butler Yeats Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats Quotes & Sayings

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An intellectual hate is the worst. — William Butler Yeats

I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day. — William Butler Yeats

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart ... — William Butler Yeats

Hammer your thoughts into unity. — William Butler Yeats

A passion-driven exultant man sings out
Sentences that he has never thought ... — William Butler Yeats

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion ... — William Butler Yeats

We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty ... — William Butler Yeats

Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible. — William Butler Yeats

Education is not about filling a pail, it's about lighting a fire. — William Butler Yeats

My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere Time transfigured me. — William Butler Yeats

All dreams of the soul
End in a beautiful man's or woman's body. — William Butler Yeats

No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority. — William Butler Yeats

Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill. — William Butler Yeats

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste. — William Butler Yeats

Education is not filling — William Butler Yeats

How could passion run so deep
Had I never thought
That the crime of being born
Blackens all our lot? — William Butler Yeats

I say that Roger Casement
Did what he had to do,
He died upon the gallows
But that is nothing new. — William Butler Yeats

Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry. — William Butler Yeats

And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss. — William Butler Yeats

Dream, dream, for this is also sooth. — William Butler Yeats

Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song. — William Butler Yeats

Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time. — William Butler Yeats

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round. — William Butler Yeats

All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil. — William Butler Yeats

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? — William Butler Yeats

I know, although when looks meet
I tremble to the bone,
The more I leave the door unlatched
The sooner love is gone ... — William Butler Yeats

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet. — William Butler Yeats

What if the Church and the State
Are the mob that howls at the door!
Wine shall run thick to the end,
Bread taste sour. — William Butler Yeats

Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant. — William Butler Yeats

O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out. — William Butler Yeats

If soul my look and body touch, Which is the more blest? — William Butler Yeats

It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless. — William Butler Yeats

When we have blamed the wind we can blame love ... — William Butler Yeats

Tis the eternal law,
That first in beauty should be first in might. — William Butler Yeats

Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war? — William Butler Yeats

The problem wiv some blokes is that wen they ain't drunk, they're sober. — William Butler Yeats

Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality. — William Butler Yeats

Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike. — William Butler Yeats

People are responsible for their opinions, but Providence is responsible for their morals. — William Butler Yeats

Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. — William Butler Yeats

Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of. — William Butler Yeats

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. — William Butler Yeats

I hear it in the deep heart's core. — William Butler Yeats

I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang. — William Butler Yeats

I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age. — William Butler Yeats

There are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves. — William Butler Yeats

I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent — William Butler Yeats

This great purple butterfly,
In the prison of my hands,
Has a learning in his eye
Not a poor fool understands. — William Butler Yeats

The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars! — William Butler Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. — William Butler Yeats

The old priest Peter Gilligan
Was weary night and day;
For half his flock were in their beds,
Or under green sods lay. — William Butler Yeats

A drunkard is a dead man
And all dead men are drunk. — William Butler Yeats

The poor have very few hours in which to enjoy themselves; they must take their pleasure raw; they haven't the time to cook it. — William Butler Yeats

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution. — William Butler Yeats

The women that I picked spoke sweet and low
And yet gave tongue. "Hound voices" were they all. — William Butler Yeats

Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side. — William Butler Yeats

Eyes spiritualised by death can judge,
I cannot, but I am not content. — William Butler Yeats

There is only one romance the Soul's. — William Butler Yeats

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time. — William Butler Yeats

Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. — William Butler Yeats

Bid imagination run / Much on the Great Questioner; / What He can question, what if questioned I / Can with a fitting confidence reply. — William Butler Yeats

Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring. — William Butler Yeats

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought. — William Butler Yeats

I thought of rhyme alone,
For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble
And make the daylight sweet once more ... — William Butler Yeats

All men live in suffering
I know as few can know,
Whether they take the upper road
Or stay content on the low ... — William Butler Yeats

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand ... — William Butler Yeats

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy. — W.B.Yeats

What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms? — William Butler Yeats

While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate phantasy. — William Butler Yeats

And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes. — William Butler Yeats

My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head. — William Butler Yeats

O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host
Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet. — William Butler Yeats

One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end. — William Butler Yeats

The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained. — William Butler Yeats

And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance. — William Butler Yeats

To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful. — William Butler Yeats

It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring. — William Butler Yeats

I agree about Shaw - he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor. — William Butler Yeats

There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be a work so great
As that which cleans man's dirty slate. — William Butler Yeats

It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world. — William Butler Yeats

What can I but enumerate old themes? — William Butler Yeats

Our words must seem to be inevitable. — William Butler Yeats

No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands. — William Butler Yeats

O would, beloved, that you lay
Under the dock-leaves in the ground,
While lights were paling one by one. — William Butler Yeats

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds. — William Butler Yeats

I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window ... — William Butler Yeats

Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline. — William Butler Yeats

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed. — William Butler Yeats

The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it. — William Butler Yeats

While man can still his body keep
Wine or love drug him to sleep,
Waking he thanks the Lord that he
Has body and its stupidity ... — William Butler Yeats

If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf — William Butler Yeats

O heart, we are old;
The living beauty is for younger men:
We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears. — William Butler Yeats

Yet they that know all things but know
That all this life can give us is
A child's laughter, a woman's kiss. — William Butler Yeats

Give to these children, new from the world,
Rest far from men.
Is anything better, anything better?
Tell us it then ... — William Butler Yeats

Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea. — William Butler Yeats

Only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art. — William Butler Yeats

Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers. — William Butler Yeats

The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who live with it. — William Butler Yeats

David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision — James Hollis

Words alone are certain good. — William Butler Yeats