Top 32 William B Yeats Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
W.B.Yeats
#4. 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
#5. And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
William Butler Yeats
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
William Butler Yeats
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
William Butler Yeats
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
William Butler Yeats
#17. 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
#18. 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
#20. The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream.
William Butler Yeats
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
William Butler Yeats
#29. Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul
William Butler Yeats
#30. Give to these children, new from the world,
Rest far from men.
Is anything better, anything better?
Tell us it then ...
William Butler Yeats
#32. 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
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