William Butler Yeats Quotes

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

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

You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements. ~ William Butler 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

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. ~ William Butler Yeats

He Who is wrapped in purple robes,
With planets in His care,
Had pity on the least of things
Asleep upon a chair. ~ William Butler Yeats

No man has ever lived that had enough of children's gratitude or woman's love. ~ William Butler Yeats

The falcon cannot hear the falconer ~ William Butler Yeats

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. ~ William Butler Yeats

Although our love is waning, let us stand by the lone border of the lake once more, together in that hour of gentleness. When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us. ~ William Butler Yeats

I pray-for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

The hare grows old as she plays in the sun
And gazes around her with eyes of brightness;
Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done
She limps along in an aged whiteness ... ~ 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 labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.
Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind ... ~ William Butler Yeats

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

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

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind. ~ William Butler Yeats

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while ... ~ 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

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

A spot whereon the founders lived and died
Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees,
Or gardens rich in memory glorified
Marriages, alliances, and families,
And every bride's ambition satisfied. ~ William Butler Yeats

It seems to me that love, if fine, is essentially a discipline. ~ William Butler Yeats

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

I would that there was nothing in the world
But my beloved that night and day had perished,
And all that is and all that is to be,
All that is not the meeting of our lips. ~ William Butler Yeats

All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence. ~ William Butler Yeats

And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight. ~ 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

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

But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good. ~ William Butler Yeats

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? ~ William Butler Yeats

The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart ... ~ William Butler Yeats

Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away. ~ William Butler Yeats

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
- William Butler Yeats, He Wishes For The Cloth of Heaven. ~ W.B. Yeats

I have found nothing half so good / As my long-planned half solitude, / Where I can sit up half the night / With some friend that has the wit ... ~ William Butler Yeats

I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem. ~ William Butler Yeats

Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward. ~ William Butler Yeats

How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb. ~ William Butler Yeats

We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936 ~ William Butler Yeats

An intellectual hate is the worst. ~ William Butler Yeats

When a man grows old his joy
Grows more deep day after day,
His empty heart is full at length
But he has need of all that strength
Because of the increasing Night
That opens her mystery and fright. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

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

What shall I do for pretty girls Now my old bawd is dead? ~ William Butler Yeats

And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

Yet it seems
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
And there's but common greenness after that. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

Hammer your thoughts into unity. ~ William Butler Yeats

But bear in mind your lover's wage
Is what your looking-glass can show,
And that he will turn green with rage
At all that is not pictured there. ~ William Butler Yeats

I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep
Till the stars are beginning to blink and peep;
And the young lie long and dream in their bed ... ~ 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

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

Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. ~ William Butler Yeats

Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade. ~ 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

Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted,
Their heads being turned with praise and flattery;
And that is why their lovers are afraid
To tell them a plain story. ~ William Butler Yeats

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay ~ William Butler Yeats

What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy. ~ William Butler Yeats

I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs,
For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood;
And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood
With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes ... ~ William Butler Yeats

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility. ~ William Butler Yeats

This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call. ~ William Butler Yeats

There is no deformity But saves us from a dream. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

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

Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain. ~ William Butler Yeats

I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote.
A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat.
So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote. ~ William Butler Yeats

If Michael, leader of God's host
When Heaven and Hell are met,
Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post
He would his deeds forget. ~ William Butler Yeats

O heart, be at peace, because
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause,
Being for a woman's sake. ~ William Butler Yeats

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. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

Where the world ends
The mind is made unchanging, for it finds
Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope,
The flagstone under all, the fire of fires,
The roots of the world. ~ 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

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

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

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

Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild. ~ William Butler Yeats

I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams. ~ William Butler Yeats

Man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality ... ~ 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

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create. ~ William Butler Yeats

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

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

I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch. ~ William Butler Yeats

Acquaintance; companion;
One dear brilliant woman;
The best-endowed, the elect,
All by their youth undone,
All, all, by that inhuman
Bitter glory wrecked. ~ William Butler Yeats

Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,
With your harmonious choir
Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,
That my old care may cease ... ~ William Butler Yeats

Education is not filling ~ William Butler Yeats

Even when the poet seems most himself ... he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete. ~ William Butler Yeats