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Quotes by William Butler Yeats

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.
– William Butler Yeats
A shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead.
– William Butler Yeats
A woman can be proud and stiff when on love intent; but love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement; for nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.
– William Butler Yeats
Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.
– William Butler Yeats
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.
– William Butler Yeats
An intellectual hatred is the worst.
– William Butler Yeats
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
– William Butler Yeats
But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
– William Butler Yeats
Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
– 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
Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
– William Butler Yeats
Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.
– William Butler Yeats
Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.
– William Butler Yeats
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
– William Butler Yeats
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
– 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
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.
– William Butler Yeats
I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.
– William Butler Yeats
I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
– William Butler Yeats
I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher.
– William Butler Yeats
I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
– William Butler Yeats
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
– William Butler Yeats
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
– William Butler Yeats
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.
– William Butler Yeats
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
– William Butler Yeats
I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.
– William Butler Yeats
In dreams begins responsibility.
– William Butler Yeats
Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
– William Butler Yeats
It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.
– William Butler Yeats
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
– William Butler Yeats
My country is Kiltartan Cross; my countrymen Kiltartan's poor.
– William Butler Yeats
Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.
– William Butler Yeats
Now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
– William Butler Yeats
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.
– William Butler Yeats
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
– William Butler Yeats
Swift has sailed into his rest; savage indignation there cannot lacerate his breast. Imitate him if you dare, world-besotted traveller; he served human liberty.
– William Butler Yeats
Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.
– William Butler Yeats
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
– William Butler Yeats
The ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door.
– William Butler Yeats
The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
– William Butler Yeats
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
– William Butler Yeats
The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
– William Butler Yeats
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
– William Butler Yeats
The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
– 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
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
– 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
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
Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?
– William Butler Yeats
We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
– William Butler Yeats
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
– William Butler Yeats
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
– 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
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
– 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
You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.
– 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;

A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind,
An old man's eagle mind.
– William Butler Yeats
You shall go with me, newly-married bride,
And gaze upon a merrier multitude.
White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds,
Feachra of the hurtling form, and him
Who is the ruler of the Western Host,
Finvara, and their Land of Heart's Desire.
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
– 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
One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
– William Butler Yeats
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
– William Butler Yeats
If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.
– William Butler Yeats
I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.
– William Butler Yeats
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
– William Butler Yeats
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
– William Butler Yeats