W.B.Yeats Quotes & Sayings

I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love. — W.B.Yeats

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

Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. — W.B.Yeats

Before The World Was Made
If I make the lashes dark
and the eyes more bright
and the lips more scarlet,
or ask if all be right
from mirror after mirror,
no vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
before the world was made.
What if I look upon a man
as though on my beloved,
and my blood be cold the while
and my heart unmoved?
Why should he think me cruel
or that he is betrayed?
I'd have him love the thing that was
before the world was made. — W.B.Yeats

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions. — W.B.Yeats

And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings ... — W.B.Yeats

The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. — W.B.Yeats

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

if one writes one can do nothing else. — W.B.Yeats

I wish for you constantly for I want to talk about everybody and everything. I can't go up to a stranger & say 'your manners &looks have stirred me to this profound meditation'- — W.B.Yeats

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away. — W.B.Yeats

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

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

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. — W.B.Yeats

As one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, — W.B.Yeats

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

Cast a cold eye
on life, on death
Horseman pass by — W.B.Yeats

Then the woman in the bed sat up and looked about her with wild eyes; and the oldest of the old men said: 'Lady, we have come to write down the names of the immortals,' and at his words a look of great joy came into her face. Presently she, began to speak slowly, and yet eagerly, as though she knew she had but a little while to live, and, in English, with the accent of their own country; and she told them the secret names of the immortals of many lands, and of the colours, and odours, and weapons, and instruments of music and instruments of handicraft they held dearest; but most about the immortals of Ireland and of their love for the cauldron, and the whetstone, and the sword, and the spear, and the hills of the Shee, and the horns of the moon, and the Grey Wind, and the Yellow Wind, and the Black Wind, and the Red Wind. ("The Adoration of the Magi") — W.B.Yeats

A king is but a foolish labourer
Who wastes his blood to be another's dream.
-from Fergus and the Druid — W.B.Yeats

Literature is, to my mind, the great teaching power of the world, the ultimate creator of all values, and it is this, not only in the sacred books whose power everybody acknowledges, but by every movement of imagination in song or story or drama that height of intensity and sincerity has made literature at all. Literature must take the responsibility of its power, and keep all its freedom: it must be like the spirit and like the wind that blows where it listeth; it must claim its right to pierce through every crevice of human nature, and to descrive the relation of the soul and the heart to the facts of life and of law, and to describe that relation as it is, not as we would have it be ... — W.B.Yeats

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD
WHO dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet. — W.B.Yeats

Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself. — W.B.Yeats

When one gets quiet, then something wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet like the stars. — W.B.Yeats

Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun - the shoemaker. — W.B.Yeats

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing can hold them from being all that the heart desires.
from a preface to
Gods and Fighting Men
by Lady Augusta Gregory — W.B.Yeats

On November Eve they are at their gloomiest, for according to the old Gaelic reckoning, this is the first night of winter. This night they dance with the ghosts, and the pooka is abroad, and witches make their spells, and girls set a table with food in the name of the devil, that the fetch of their future lover may come through the window and eat of the food. After November Eve the blackberries are no longer wholesome, for the pooka has spoiled them. — W.B.Yeats

Oh, who could have foretold That the heart grows old? — W.B.Yeats

We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body. — W.B.Yeats

I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns. — W.B.Yeats

In dreams begin responsibilities. — W.B.Yeats

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

Rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination — W.B.Yeats

The Scholars
Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
They'll cough in the ink to the world's end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Should their Catullus walk that way? — W.B.Yeats

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking. — W.B.Yeats

I whispered, 'I am too young,' and then, 'I am old enough'; wherefore I threw a penny to find out if I might love. — W.B.Yeats

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head — W.B.Yeats

Hearts are not to be had as a gift, hearts are to be earned. — W.B.Yeats

I Sing what was lost and dread what was won,
I walk in a battle fought over again — W.B.Yeats

She looked in my heart one day And saw your image was there; She has gone weeping away. — W.B.Yeats

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober. — W.B.Yeats

Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;
Remember the wisdom out of the old days:
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry ways,
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely, majestical multitude. — W.B.Yeats

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face. — W.B.Yeats

It is a hard service they take that help me. Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to walk the hills and the bogs and the rushes will be sent to walk hard streets in far countries; many a good plan will be broken; many that have gathered money will not stay to spend it; many a child will be born, and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name. They that had red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake; and for all that, they will think they are well paid. — W.B.Yeats

An Irish Airman foresees his Death
I Know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love,
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
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

From man's blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung.
What's the meaning of all song?
Let all things pass away. — W.B.Yeats

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

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery; — W.B.Yeats

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

God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone. — W.B.Yeats

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

He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or to make him sad. I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, 'Am I not annoyed with them?' I asked too if he had ever seen the banshee. 'I have seen it,' he said, 'down there by the water, batting the river with its hands.' ("A Teller of Tales") — W.B.Yeats

Where there is nothing, there is God. — W.B.Yeats

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those who are not entirely beautiful. — W.B.Yeats

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

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing. — W.B.Yeats

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is lost
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. — W.B.Yeats

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while. — W.B.Yeats

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep ... — W.B.Yeats

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know-
Although they do not talk of it at school -
That we must labor to be beautiful. — W.B.Yeats

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come. — W.B.Yeats

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

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

And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone. — W.B.Yeats

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears. — W.B.Yeats

There is no truth
Saving in thine own heart.
-from The Song of the Happy Shepherd — W.B.Yeats

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

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping ... I hear it in the deep heart's core. — W.B.Yeats

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

Ah, you may tell the girls that they must now get their turn. My punishment was to last till I was thought worthy of a reward for the way I done my duty. You'll see me no more. — W.B.Yeats

As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams. — W.B.Yeats

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is — W.B.Yeats

The Wheel
Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all;
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come
Nor know what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb. — W.B.Yeats

For the winds that awakened the stars are blowing through my blood. — W.B.Yeats

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses. — W.B.Yeats

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

Where My Books Go

All the words that I gather,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad
heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm darkened or starry bright. — W.B.Yeats

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

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

One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or a dog that howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away. — W.B.Yeats

Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you. — W.B.Yeats

Her Triumph
I did the dragon's will until you came
Because I had fancied love a casual
Improvisation, or a settled game
That followed if I let the kerchief fall:
Those deeds were best that gave the minute wings
And heavenly music if they gave it wit;
And then you stood among the dragon-rings.
I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it
And broke the chain and set my ankles free,
Saint George or else a pagan Perseus;
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us. — W.B.Yeats

And when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out — W.B.Yeats

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

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died? — W.B.Yeats

The Magi
Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. — W.B.Yeats

I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find — W.B.Yeats

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

To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart — W.B.Yeats

When they had finished they made me take notes of whatever conversation they had quoted, so that I might have the exact words, and got up to go, and when I asked them where they were going and what they were doing and by what names I should call them, they would tell me nothing, except that they had been commanded to travel over Ireland continually, and upon foot and at night, that they might live close to the stones and the trees and at the hours when the immortals are awake. — W.B.Yeats

better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and unreason alike, — W.B.Yeats

Things fall apart;
the center cannot hold... — W.B.Yeats

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

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

(I) only write it now because 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. ("The Adoration of The Magi") — W.B.Yeats

I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown. — W.B.Yeats

Sometimes, but only for a moment, I saw a faint solitary
figure with a Rosa veiled face, and carrying a faint torch, flit among the dancers, but like a dream within a
dream, like a shadow of a shadow, and I knew by an understanding born from a deeper fountain than thought,
that it was Eros himself, and that his face was veiled because no man or woman from the beginning of the
world has ever known what love is, or looked into his eyes, for Eros alone of divinities is altogether a spirit,
and hides in passions not of his essence if he would commune with a mortal heart. So that if a man love nobly
he knows love through infinite pity, unspeakable trust, unending sympathy; and if ignobly through vehement
jealousy, sudden hatred, and unappeasable desire; but unveiled love he never knows. — W.B.Yeats

Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad. — W.B.Yeats

Politics
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms! — W.B.Yeats

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

I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say: Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay, He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light. — W.B.Yeats