Yeats Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Yeats

Yeats Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Yeats quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown. — W.B.Yeats

They shall be remembered forever,
They shall be alive forever,
They shall be speaking forever,
The people shall hear them forever. — W.B.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

Nor are there singing schools but studying monuments of its own magnificence. — W.B.Yeats

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

Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it. — W.B.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

I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self. — W.B.Yeats

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

I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find — W.B.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

Love comes in at the eye. — W.B.Yeats

Education is not filling — William Butler Yeats

To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart — W.B.Yeats

I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. — W.B.Yeats

Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. — W. H. Auden

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

Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high. — W.B.Yeats

Wine enters through the mouth,
Love, the eyes.
I raise the glass to my mouth,
I look at you,
I sigh. — W.B.Yeats

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings. — W.B.Yeats

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses. — W.B.Yeats

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. — W.B.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

And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone. — W.B.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

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

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

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

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

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

Hearts are not to be had as a gift, hearts are to be earned. — W.B.Yeats

How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born? — W.B.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

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

Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. — W.B.Yeats

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

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live. — W.B.Yeats

the cloak of Sorrow: O — W.B.Yeats

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

What hurts the soul
My soul adores — W.B.Yeats

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions. — W.B.Yeats

The Americans never walk. In winter too cold and in summer too hot. — Jack Butler Yeats

Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart. — W.B.Yeats

Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death, — W.B.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

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

The Light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed
The Shadow of Shadows looks on the deed alone. — W.B.Yeats

....tradition gives the one thing many shapes. — W.B.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

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

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. - W. B. Yeats — Daniel Coyle

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

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

All things change, save only the fear of change. — W.B.Yeats

Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you. — W.B.Yeats

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love — W.B.Yeats

There are no strangers, only friends you have not met yet. — W.B.Yeats

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

Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply. — Patrick Kavanagh

better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and unreason alike, — W.B.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

I am still of [the] opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood
sex and the dead. — W.B.Yeats

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

With him in defense, we could play Arthur Askey in goal.
(after signing Ron Yeats) — Bill Shankly

Why should the faithfullest heart most love The bitter sweetness of false faces? — W.B.Yeats

Words alone are certain good. — William Butler Yeats

And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance. — 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

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is — W.B.Yeats

I carry the Sun in a Golden Cup, the Moon in a Silver Bag. — W.B.Yeats

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

Where there is nothing, there is God. — W.B.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

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. — W.B.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

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. — W.B.Yeats