Top 100 William Butler Yeats Quotes
#1. Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul
William Butler Yeats
#2. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
William Butler Yeats
#3. 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
#6. Poetry and music I have banished,
But the stupidity
Of root, shoot, blossom or clay
Makes no demand.
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.
William Butler Yeats
#7. When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream ...
William Butler Yeats
#8. Now must we sing and sing the best we can,
But first you must be told your character:
Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.
William Butler Yeats
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. If what I say resonates with you, it's merely because we're branches of the same tree.
William Butler Yeats
#12. Boughs have their fruit and blossom
At all times of the year;
Rivers are running over
With red beer and brown beer.
William Butler Yeats
#14. 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
#15. O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
William Butler Yeats
#16. I am haunted by numberless islands, many a Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
William Butler Yeats
#17. 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
#18. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent
William Butler Yeats
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#23. 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
#26. 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
#27. It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.
William Butler Yeats
#28. A speckled cat and a tame hare
Eat at my hearthstone
And sleep there;
And both look up to me alone
For learning and defence
As I look up to Providence.
William Butler Yeats
#29. Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
William Butler Yeats
#30. Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
William Butler Yeats
#31. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
William Butler Yeats
#32. O heart, we are old;
The living beauty is for younger men:
We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.
William Butler Yeats
#33. 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
#34. We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
William Butler Yeats
#36. 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
#38. Because the priest must have like every dog his day
Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon,
We and our dolls being but the world were best away.
William Butler Yeats
#39. 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
#40. When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.
William Butler Yeats
#42. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#43. 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
#46. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write ... I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance - the revolt of the soul against the intellect.
William Butler Yeats
#48. 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
#51. 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
#52. Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath,
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night ...
William Butler Yeats
#53. Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked and where are they?
William Butler Yeats
#54. Sweetheart, do not love too long:
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.
William Butler Yeats
#55. All that could run or leap or swim
Whether in wood, water or cloud,
Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him.
William Butler Yeats
#56. All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake.
William Butler Yeats
#60. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
William Butler Yeats
#61. But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough
And pressed at midnighht in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
William Butler Yeats
#62. I thought it out this very day,
Noon upon the clock,
A man may put pretence away
Who leans upon a stick,
May sing, and sing until he drop,
Whether to maid or hag ...
William Butler Yeats
#63. 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
#64. Time can but make it easier to be wise / Though now it seems impossible, and so / All that you need is patience.
William Butler Yeats
#65. Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
William Butler Yeats
#67. 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
#68. When all is said and done, how do we know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey.
William Butler Yeats
#70. 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
#71. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#73. Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend
And dreamed that the old despair
Would end in love in the end ...
William Butler Yeats
#74. The Bishop has a skin, God knows,
Wrinkled like the foot of a goose,
(All find safety in the tomb.)
Nor can he hide in holy black
The heron's hunch upon his back,
But a birch-tree stood my Jack ...
William Butler Yeats
#75. And God would bid His warfare cease,
Saying all things were well;
And softly make a rosy peace,
A peace of Heaven with Hell.
William Butler Yeats
#76. 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
#77. Why should I seek for love or study it?
It is of God and passes human wit;
I study hatred with great diligence,
For that's a passion in my own control,
A sort of besom that can clear the soul
Of everything that is not mind or sense.
William Butler Yeats
#78. In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.
William Butler Yeats
#79. Though pedantry denies,
It's plain the Bible means
That Solomon grew wise
While talking with his queens ...
William Butler Yeats
#80. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theater business, management of men.
William Butler Yeats
#82. 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
#83. Let the minor genius go his light way and enjoy his life - the great nature cannot so live, he is never really in holiday mood, even though he often plucks flowers by the wayside and ties them into knots and garlands like little children and lays out on a sunny morning.
William Butler Yeats
#84. Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul," I cried. "My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied."
William Butler Yeats
#85. The friends that have I do it wrong
Whenever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.
William Butler Yeats
#86. 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
#87. Though logic-choppers rule the town,
And every man and maid and boy
Has marked a distant object down,
An aimless joy is a pure joy ...
William Butler Yeats
#88. 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
#89. For what but eye and ear silence the mind
With the minute particulars of mankind?
William Butler Yeats
#90. O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host
Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet.
William Butler Yeats
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.
William Butler Yeats
#94. And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
William Butler Yeats
#95. My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere Time transfigured me.
William Butler Yeats
#96. Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.
William Butler Yeats
#98. I say that Roger Casement
Did what he had to do,
He died upon the gallows
But that is nothing new.
William Butler Yeats
#99. 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.
William Butler Yeats
#100. Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
William Butler Yeats
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