William Butler Yeats Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational William Butler Yeats quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
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 outSentences that he has never thought ... — William Butler Yeats
Civilisation is hooped together, broughtUnder 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 fireIn every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere Time transfigured me. — William Butler Yeats
All dreams of the soulEnd 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 deepHad I never thought
That the crime of being born
Blackens all our lot? — William Butler Yeats
I say that Roger CasementDid 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 isTo 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 meetI 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 StateAre the mob that howls at the door!
Wine shall run thick to the end,
Bread taste sour. — William Butler Yeats
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; youngWe 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 manLong 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 hidUnder this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. — William Butler Yeats
The old priest Peter GilliganWas 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 manAnd 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 lowAnd 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 sufferingI 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 satUnder 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 hostIs 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 releaseIn 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 layUnder 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 keepWine 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 knowThat 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 heartConceives 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