Top 100 W.B.Yeats Quotes
#1. It's not a dream,
But the reality that makes our passion
As a lamp shadow - no - no lamp, the sun.
What the world's million lips are thirsting for
Must be substantial somewhere ...
W.B.Yeats
#2. We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living
Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world,
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.
W.B.Yeats
#3. The Coming of Wisdom with Time
Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.
W.B.Yeats
#4. Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
W.B.Yeats
#5. The Light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed
The Shadow of Shadows looks on the deed alone.
W.B.Yeats
#7. Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
W.B.Yeats
#8. The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
W.B.Yeats
#9. The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.
W.B.Yeats
#10. All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it
W.B.Yeats
#11. And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
W.B.Yeats
#12. 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.
W.B.Yeats
#13. O bid me mount and sail up there
Amid the cloudy wrack,
For Peg and Meg and Paris' love
That had so straight a back,
Are gone away, and some that stay
Have changed their silk for sack.
W.B.Yeats
#14. My wretched dragon is perplexed.
W.B.Yeats
#15. And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery;
W.B.Yeats
#16. But he heard high up in the air
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
W.B.Yeats
#17. Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me
("The Circus Animal's Desertion")
W.B.Yeats
#18. Everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
W.B.Yeats
#19. All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
W.B.Yeats
#20. ....tradition gives the one thing many shapes.
W.B.Yeats
#21. One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.
- Memory
W.B.Yeats
#23. Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
W.B.Yeats
#24. Nor are there singing schools but studying monuments of its own magnificence.
W.B.Yeats
#25. I shall arise and go to Innisfree
W.B.Yeats
#26. 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
#27. In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet
("Oil and Blood")
W.B.Yeats
#29. Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell.
W.B.Yeats
#30. if one writes one can do nothing else.
W.B.Yeats
#31. Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.
W.B.Yeats
#32. Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.
W.B.Yeats
#33. Where there is nothing, there is God.
W.B.Yeats
#34. SHE hears me strike the board and say
That she is under ban
Of all good men and women,
Being mentioned with a man
That has the worst of all bad names;
And thereupon replies
That his hair is beautiful,
Cold as the March wind his eyes.
W.B.Yeats
#35. What is clearest, most memorable and important about art is its coming into being, and the world's best works of art, while telling of very diverse matters, are really telling about their birth.
W.B.Yeats
#36. Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death,
W.B.Yeats
#37. And when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out
W.B.Yeats
#38. When I think of life as struggle with the Daimon who would ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man loves nothing but his destiny.
W.B.Yeats
#39. I cannot now think symbols less
than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by
the master of magic or half unconsciously by their successors, the
poet, the musician, and the artist.
W.B.Yeats
#40. Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
W.B.Yeats
#41. 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
#42. Sing, for it may be that your thoughts have plucked Some medicable herb to make our grief Less bitter.
W.B.Yeats
#43. Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
W.B.Yeats
#44. The living can assist the imagination of the dead ...
W.B.Yeats
#45. There is some Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all that he did and thought.
W.B.Yeats
#46. People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
W.B.Yeats
#47. A Drinking Song 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. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh.
W.B.Yeats
#48. So the platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.
W.B.Yeats
#49. Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
W.B.Yeats
#50. The Nineteenth Century And After
Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.
W.B.Yeats
#51. For nothing can be sole or whole. That has not been rent.
W.B.Yeats
#52. It's a long lane that has no turning.
W.B.Yeats
#53. To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart
W.B.Yeats
#54. The Realists
HOPE that you may understand!
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons?
W.B.Yeats
#55. It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is
W.B.Yeats
#56. Why should the faithfullest heart most love The bitter sweetness of false faces?
W.B.Yeats
#58. I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
W.B.Yeats
#59. 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.
W.B.Yeats
#60. 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
W.B.Yeats
#61. Labor is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
W.B.Yeats
#62. Irish poets, learn your trade,
sing whatever is well made,
scorn the sort now growing up
all out of shape from toe to top.
W.B.Yeats
#63. Mr. Dowler, could you go through this? Mr. Algie. Don't answer him, Dowler; he's going beyond all bounds. Paul Ruttledge. I was a rich man and I could not, and yet I am something smaller than a camel, and this is something larger than a needle's eye.
W.B.Yeats
#64. There is another world, but it is in this one.
W.B.Yeats
#65. 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
#66. Ah, faerics, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune!
While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
W.B.Yeats
#67. I no longer went to church as a regular habit, but go I sometimes did, for one Sunday morning I saw these words painted on a board in the porch: 'The congregation are requested to kneel during prayers; the kneelers are afterwards to be hung upon pegs provided for the purpose.
W.B.Yeats
#68. I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked
W.B.Yeats
#69. And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.
W.B.Yeats
#70. Go on, live in your poultry-yard. Scratch straw and cluck and cackle at everything that you take for a fox. [Exit.
W.B.Yeats
#71. There are no strangers, only friends you have not met yet.
W.B.Yeats
#72. Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
W.B.Yeats
#73. But I am old and you are young, And I speak a barbarous tongue.
W.B.Yeats
#74. Cast a cold eye
on life, on death
Horseman pass by
W.B.Yeats
#75. What hurts the soul
My soul adores
W.B.Yeats
#76. O hiding hair and dewy eyes, I am no more with life and death, My heart upon his warm heart lies, My breath is mixed into his breath.
W.B.Yeats
#77. There is no truth
Saving in thine own heart.
-from The Song of the Happy Shepherd
W.B.Yeats
#78. Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.
W.B.Yeats
#79. Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh heart again in the gray twilight, Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
W.B.Yeats
#80. I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell.
W.B.Yeats
#81. All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
W.B.Yeats
#82. So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could recover if I shrieked
My heart's agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb.
W.B.Yeats
#83. For he comes, the human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping
than he can understand.
W.B.Yeats
#84. It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
[from "The Circus Animals' Desertion"]
W.B.Yeats
#85. I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
W.B.Yeats
#86. The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.
W.B.Yeats
#87. Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself.
W.B.Yeats
#88. To A Squirrel At Kyle-Na-No
Come play with me;
Why should you run
Through the shaking tree
As though I'd a gun
To strike you dead?
When all I would do
Is to scratch your head
And let you go.
W.B.Yeats
#89. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.
W.B.Yeats
#90. I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find
W.B.Yeats
#91. Hearts are not to be had as a gift, hearts are to be earned.
W.B.Yeats
#92. They must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened from looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a girl's heart.
W.B.Yeats
#93. It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield
W.B.Yeats
#94. All things change, save only the fear of change.
W.B.Yeats
#95. Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
W.B.Yeats
#96. Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.
W.B.Yeats
#97. The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over it their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Gray Truth is now her painted toy.
W.B.Yeats
#98. There was present that night at Henley's, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of the secret spite of dullness, who interrupted from time to time and always to check or disorder thought;
W.B.Yeats
#99. I had a thought for no one's but your ears; / That you were beautiful, and that I strove / To love you in the old high way of love;
W.B.Yeats
#100. You who are bent, and bald, and blind, With a heavy heart and a wandering mind, Have known three centuries, poets sing, Of dalliance with a demon thing.
W.B.Yeats
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