Top 100 William Yeats Quotes
#1. Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
W. H. Auden
#2. 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
#3. Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
William Butler Yeats
#4. 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
#6. Give to these children, new from the world,
Rest far from men.
Is anything better, anything better?
Tell us it then ...
William Butler Yeats
#7. Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole,
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul
William Butler Yeats
#8. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
William Butler Yeats
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream.
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
#19. 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
#21. All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
William Butler Yeats
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
William Butler Yeats
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
William Butler Yeats
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
William Butler Yeats
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality ...
William Butler Yeats
#35. I would that I were an old beggar
Rolling a blind pearl eye,
For he cannot see my lady
Go gallivanting by.
William Butler Yeats
#36. If what I say resonates with you, it's merely because we're branches of the same tree.
William Butler Yeats
#37. David McKay, 1900. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929. Yeats, William Butler. A Vision
James Hollis
#38. I know of the leafy paths that the witches take
Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,
And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake ...
William Butler Yeats
#39. 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
#42. A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
William Butler Yeats
#43. In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.
William Butler Yeats
#44. I thought of rhyme alone,
For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble
And make the daylight sweet once more ...
William Butler Yeats
#45. 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
#46. O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
William Butler Yeats
#47. For such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend. r
William Butler Yeats
#48. Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.
William Butler Yeats
#50. 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
#51. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.
William Butler Yeats
#52. I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English.
William Butler Yeats
#53. Many times man lives and dies
Betweeen his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead
William Butler Yeats
#54. And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place ...
William Butler Yeats
#55. Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
William Butler Yeats
#56. There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be a work so great
As that which cleans man's dirty slate.
William Butler Yeats
#58. 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
#59. Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?
I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;
I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns ...
William Butler Yeats
#60. It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.
William Butler Yeats
#61. If Michael, leader of God's host
When Heaven and Hell are met,
Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post
He would his deeds forget.
William Butler Yeats
#62. Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
William Butler Yeats
#63. It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.
William Butler Yeats
#64. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent
William Butler Yeats
#65. I
love's skein upon the ground,
My body in the tomb
Shall leap into the light lost
In my mother's womb.
William Butler Yeats
#67. True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
William Butler Yeats
#68. Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.
William Butler Yeats
#69. I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?
William Butler Yeats
#71. But stories that live longest
Are sung above the glass,
And Parnell loved his country
And Parnell loved his lass.
William Butler Yeats
#72. The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.
William Butler Yeats
#73. No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.
William Butler Yeats
#74. 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
#75. Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.
William Butler Yeats
#78. Let the new faces play what tricks they will
In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,
Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,
The living seem more shadowy than they.
William Butler Yeats
#79. 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
#80. I weave the shoes of Sorrow:
Soundless shall be the footfall light
In all men's ears of Sorrow,
Sudden and light.
William Butler Yeats
#81. Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.
William Butler Yeats
#82. 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
#83. Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will ...
William Butler Yeats
#85. I see a schoolboy when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window ...
William Butler Yeats
#86. How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?
William Butler Yeats
#89. 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
#91. The pain others give passes away in their later kindness, but that of our own blunders, especially when they hurt our vanity, never passes away
William Butler Yeats
#92. My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
"This Land of Saints," and then as the applause died out,
"Of plaster Saints;" his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.
William Butler Yeats
#94. Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.
William Butler Yeats
#95. Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
William Butler Yeats
#96. I would have touched it like a child But knew my finger could but have touched Cold stone and water. I grew wild, Even accusing heaven because It had set down among its laws: Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch.
William Butler Yeats
#97. No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
William Butler Yeats
#98. 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
#99. What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?
William Butler Yeats
#100. My soul had found
All happiness in its own cause or ground.
Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot
Godhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot
Those amorous cries that out of quiet come
And must the common round of day resume.
William Butler Yeats
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