William Butler Yeats quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from William Butler Yeats on Wise Famous Quotes.

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 ...

I have no question: It is enough, I know what fixed the station Of star and cloud. And knowing all, I cry ...

Hammer your thoughts into unity.

That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.

Everything we look upon is blest.

I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young / And weep because I know all things now.

Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.

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

Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.

The women take so little stock
In what I do or say
They'd sooner leave their cosseting
To hear a jackass bray ...

My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.

The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.

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

Those men that in their writings are most wise
Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.

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

Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?

The common breeds the common,
A lout begets a lout,
So when I take on half a score
I knock their heads about.

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

May we two stand,
When we are dead, beyond the setting suns,
A little from other shades apart,
With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.

But stories that live longest
Are sung above the glass,
And Parnell loved his country
And Parnell loved his lass.

Boughs have their fruit and blossom
At all times of the year;
Rivers are running over
With red beer and brown beer.

Time can but make it easier to be wise / Though now it seems impossible, and so / All that you need is patience.

Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.

It seems to me that true love is a discipline ...

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

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

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

The poet is a good citizen turned inside out.

Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.

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

It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat.

When we have blamed the wind we can blame love ...

I believe ... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.

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

What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?

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.

True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.

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

We are fastened to a dying animal.

The Father and His angelic hierarchy
That made the magnitude and glory there
Stood in the circuit of a needle's eye.

The Muse is mute when public men
Applaud a modern throne.

The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

For how can you compete Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbour's eyes?

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

I would that I were an old beggar
Rolling a blind pearl eye,
For he cannot see my lady
Go gallivanting by.

Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,
For each an imagined image brings
And finds a real image there ...

How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ?

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

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

Thought is a garment and the soul's a bride
That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide:
Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.

Sweetheart, do not love too long:
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.

What can I but enumerate old themes?

His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbor knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

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

There where the course is,
Delight makes all of the one mind,
The riders upon the galloping horses,
The crowd that closes in behind ...

All through the years of our youth
Neither could have known
Their own thought from the other's,
We were so much at one.

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

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.

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

Come swish around my pretty punk
And keep me dancing still
That I may stay a sober man
Although I drink my fill.

There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.

If what I say resonates with you, it's merely because we're branches of the same tree.

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.

Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath,
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night ...

In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.

Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.

A drunkard is a dead man
And all dead men are drunk.

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

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.

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

I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent

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

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

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.

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

Come near; I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.

Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul

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.

I had a chair at every hearth,
When no one turned to see,
With 'Look at that old fellow there,
'And who may he be?

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.

What if I bade you leave
The cavern of the mind?
There's better exercise
In the sunlight and wind.

Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

Laughter not time destroyed my voice
And put that crack in it,
And when the moon's pot-bellied
I get a laughing fit ...

Words alone are certain good.

Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.

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

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

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

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney
Folk dance like a wave on the sea.

Ah, let us kiss each other's eyes,/And laugh our love away.

In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.