Top 100 Quotes About Yeats
#1. We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather around us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even a fiercer life because of our quiet. William Butler Yeats
Jack Kornfield
#2. I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.
Patti Smith
#3. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#4. The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.
Reynolds Price
#5. The would-be maturing believer is not challenged to any adult faith or service to the world, much less mystical union. Everyone ends up in a muddled middle, where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as William Butler Yeats put it.
Richard Rohr
#6. David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision
James Hollis
#7. I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats is enough for me.
Linda Hamilton
#8. Despite his dodgy politics, Yeats remains an inspiration for his genius and the simple fact that the older he got, the better he wrote.
David Benioff
#9. Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn't goal attainment but the process of striving after goals-that is, growth-that brings happiness.
Gretchen Rubin
#10. As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.
Leonard Cohen
#11. Yeats knew nothing about life: it was all symbols
& Wordsworthian egotism: Yeats on Cemetery Ridge
would not have been scared, like you & me,
he would have been, before the bullet that was his,
studying the movements of the birds,
said disappointed & amazed Henry.
John Berryman
#12. I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
Diane Wakoski
#13. Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
Richard Dawkins
#14. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned W. B. Yeats 'The Second Coming
Rennie Airth
#15. 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. - W. B. YEATS
Al Alvarez
#16. This resembles the slow discipline of art: it's the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize.
Robert Bly
#17. Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.
Anne Stevenson
#18. I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.
Lucian Freud
#19. He'd be quoting Yeats any moment now if he kept up this nonsense.
Kelly Moran
#20. Irish fathers still have certain responsibilities, and by the time my two daughters turned seven, they could swim, ride a bike, sing at least one part of a Woody Guthrie song, and recite all of W. B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.'
Adrian McKinty
#21. With him in defense, we could play Arthur Askey in goal.
(after signing Ron Yeats)
Bill Shankly
#22. How can we know the dancer from the dance? Did Yeats create his poems, or did his poetry make him a poet? How does one separate the creator from his
creation? They create each other. On a mutual plane of reference, one has no existence without the other.
Indu Muralidharan
#23. An aimless joy is a pure joy," I said, quoting Yeats.
Paul Theroux
#24. To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because you have taught me my trade.
Lady Gregory
#25. I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.
J. Courtney Sullivan
#26. In dreams begin responsibilities," as the poet Yeats said,
Andrew Klavan
#27. I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
Chinua Achebe
#28. FRANK: Do you know Yeats?
RITA: The wine lodge?
FRANK: No, WB Yeats, the poet.
RITA: No.
FRANK: Well, in his poem 'The Wild Swans At Coole',Yeats rhymes the word "swan" with the word "stone". You see? That's an example of assonance.
RITA: Yeah, means getting the rhyme wrong.
Willy Russell
#29. It is always reassuring to discover that great writers are as fallible as oneself. W.B. Yeats once failed to obtain an academic post in Dublin because he misspelt the word 'professor' on his application.
Terry Eagleton
#30. It's just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.
Haruki Murakami
#31. Yeats, you need ten years in the library, but I have need of ten years in the wilderness.
Lionel Johnson
#32. I think that with Bob Dylan around, we're living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It's that level.
Benmont Tench
#33. Mr. Yeats makes great poetry out of what he calls his unhappiness about me, and he is happy in that. - Maud Gonne
Orna Ross
#34. Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.
Hal Duncan
#35. Yeats said, 'Men of action, when they lose all belief, believe only in action.
Stephen Hunter
#36. Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell?
-Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil
W.B.Yeats
#37. I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.
John Berryman
#39. One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.
Edward Abbey
#40. W. B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#41. Yeats answered, "in looking for the next rhyme word.
Philip Rowland
#42. I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.
Edward Hirsch
#43. Many years before, she had read, and recognized as true, the words of W. B. Yeats: 'A Pity beyond all telling is hit at the heart of love'. She had smiled over the poem, and stroked the page, because she had known both that she loved Colin, and that compassion formed a huge part of her love.
J.K. Rowling
#44. Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in 'In Memory of WB Yeats': "You were silly like us.
Christopher Bram
#45. Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.
Patrick Kavanagh
#46. There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.
John F. Kennedy
#47. When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
Howard Nemerov
#48. For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.
Kathleen Raine
#49. Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. - W. B. Yeats
Daniel Coyle
#50. Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
W. H. Auden
#51. The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
Seamus Heaney
#52. After twenty centuries of stony sleep, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats - from 'The Second Coming
W.B.Yeats
#53. All our lives, we long, we long, thinking it is the moon we long for. So how, when we meet it in the shape of a most fair woman, can we do less than leave all others for her? WB Yeats
Orna Ross
#54. Only God, my dear," wrote Yeats blithely, "Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair." This quote is meant as a bit of lighthearted verse. But it is an epic tragedy in three lines.
Naomi Wolf
#55. The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.
Saki
#56. People become writers in the first place by those things that hurt you into art, as Yeats said it. Then they become separated from what started out affecting them. Journalism forces you to look at the world so you don't get cut off.
Pete Hamill
#57. This type of psychological loneliness is perhaps felt most acutely when we are as close to another person's body as is humanly possible. As the poet William Butler Yeats wrote rather dramatically, The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
Jesse Bering
#58. I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.
Billy Collins
#59. Yeats was the greatest poet of our times ... certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.
T. S. Eliot
#60. The chief imagination of Christendom,
Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself
That he has made that hollow face of his
More plain to the mind's eye than any face
But that of Christ.
William Butler Yeats
#61. Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
William Butler Yeats
#62. 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
#64. Give to these children, new from the world,
Rest far from men.
Is anything better, anything better?
Tell us it then ...
William Butler Yeats
#65. I did not, but i saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.
W.B.Yeats
#66. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all my ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
W.B.Yeats
#67. Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul
William Butler Yeats
#68. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
William Butler Yeats
#69. 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
#70. From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.
William Butler Yeats
#71. 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
#72. Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action, for we would not change that which we love.
William Butler Yeats
#73. Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
W.B.Yeats
#74. 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
#76. So long as all is ordered for attack, and that alone, leaders will instinctively increase the number of enemies that they may give their followers something to do.
William Butler Yeats
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream.
William Butler Yeats
#81. may tranquillity walk by his elbow When wandering in the forest, if he love No
W.B.Yeats
#82. Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills ...
William Butler Yeats
#83. Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.
William Butler Yeats
#85. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
W.B.Yeats
#86. All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
William Butler Yeats
#87. 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
#88. Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
W.B.Yeats
#89. 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
#90. If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.
William Butler Yeats
#91. The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
William Butler Yeats
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. The land of fairy, where nobody gets old and godly and grave, where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue
W.B.Yeats
#95. Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
William Butler Yeats
#96. The Light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed
The Shadow of Shadows looks on the deed alone.
W.B.Yeats
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand.
Edmund Wilson
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