William Butler Yeats Quotes & Sayings

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

If soul my look and body touch, Which is the more blest? — William Butler Yeats

For wisdom is the property of the dead,
A something incompatible with life; and power,
Like everything that has the stain of blood,
A property of the living; but no stain
Can come upon the visage of the moon
When it has looked in glory from a cloud. — William Butler Yeats

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

All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone. — William Butler Yeats

We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity. — William Butler Yeats

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

For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose. — William Butler Yeats

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

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree. — William Butler Yeats

How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? — William Butler Yeats

Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone. — William Butler Yeats

Words alone are certain good. — William Butler Yeats

All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbor knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way? — William Butler Yeats

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

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

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

For what but eye and ear silence the mind
With the minute particulars of mankind? — William Butler Yeats

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

What if the Church and the State
Are the mob that howls at the door!
Wine shall run thick to the end,
Bread taste sour. — William Butler Yeats

We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother, sister of the next. Sometimes, however, a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and again. — William Butler Yeats

Brown Penny I WHISPERED, 'I am too young,' And then, 'I am old enough'; Wherefore I threw a penny To find out if I might love. 'Go and love, go and love, young man, If the lady be young and fair.' Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, I am looped in the loops of her hair. O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon. Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon. — William Butler Yeats

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself. — William Butler Yeats

Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side. — William Butler Yeats

I have nothing but the embittered sun;
Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,
And now that I have come to fifty years
I must endure the timid sun. — William Butler Yeats

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

A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought
Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,
Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.
It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad. — William Butler Yeats

The falcon cannot hear the falconer — William Butler Yeats

Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest. — William Butler Yeats

Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant. — William Butler Yeats

The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream. — William Butler Yeats

Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers. — William Butler Yeats

A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from his deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must needs think and think. — William Butler Yeats

His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine. — William Butler Yeats

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

I have mummy truths to tell
Whereat the living mock,
Though not for sober ear,
For maybe all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock. — William Butler Yeats

Eyes spiritualised by death can judge,
I cannot, but I am not content. — William Butler Yeats

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

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise. — William Butler Yeats

Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song. — William Butler Yeats

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

A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech. — William Butler Yeats

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

It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless. — William Butler Yeats

I broke my heart in two
So hard I struck.
What matter? for I know
That out of rock,
Out of a desolate source,
Love leaps upon its course. — William Butler Yeats

All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence. — William Butler Yeats

The Muse is mute when public men
Applaud a modern throne. — William Butler Yeats

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

Somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. — William Butler Yeats

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

I long for truth, and yet
I cannot stay from that
My better self disowns,
For a man's attention
Brings such satisfaction
To the craving in my bones. — William Butler Yeats

To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful. — William Butler Yeats

Because this age and the next age
Engender in the ditch,
No man can know a happy man
From any passing wretch,
If Folly link with Elegance
No man knows which is which ... — William Butler Yeats

It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure. — William Butler Yeats

Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another. — William Butler Yeats

The old priest Peter Gilligan
Was weary night and day;
For half his flock were in their beds,
Or under green sods lay. — William Butler Yeats

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind. — William Butler Yeats

Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,
For each an imagined image brings
And finds a real image there ... — William Butler Yeats

I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs,
For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood;
And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood
With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes ... — William Butler Yeats

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

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? — William Butler Yeats

How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ? — William Butler Yeats

Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea. — William Butler Yeats

What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy. — William Butler Yeats

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, — William Butler Yeats

The poor have very few hours in which to enjoy themselves; they must take their pleasure raw; they haven't the time to cook it. — William Butler Yeats

When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance. — William Butler Yeats

I sat on cushioned otter-skin:
My word was law from Ith to Emain,
And shook at Invar Amargin
The hearts of the world-troubling seamen,
And drove tumult and war away ... — William Butler Yeats

As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.
Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind ... — William Butler Yeats

Ah, let us kiss each other's eyes,/And laugh our love away. — William Butler Yeats

For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world. — William Butler Yeats

O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out. — William Butler Yeats

That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain. — William Butler Yeats

Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,
That loved his learning better than mankind,
Though courteous to the worst; much falling he
Brooded upon sanctity ... — William Butler Yeats

O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,
The poets labouring all their days
To build a perfect beauty in rhyme
Are overthrown by a woman's gaze ... — William Butler Yeats

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

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

Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire. — William Butler Yeats

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

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

You ask what I have found and far and wide I go,
Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew,
The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay,
And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen where are they? — William Butler Yeats

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before. — William Butler Yeats

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph. — William Butler Yeats

Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind. — William Butler Yeats

A drunkard is a dead man
And all dead men are drunk. — William Butler Yeats

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create. — William Butler Yeats

And if joy were not on the earth,
There were an end of change and birth,
And Earth and Heaven and Hell would die,
And in some gloomy barrow lie
Folded like a frozen fly ... — William Butler Yeats

Though pedantry denies,
It's plain the Bible means
That Solomon grew wise
While talking with his queens ... — William Butler Yeats

It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike. — William Butler Yeats

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

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

Man has created death. — William Butler Yeats

Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun ... — William Butler Yeats

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

There where the course is,
Delight makes all of the one mind,
The riders upon the galloping horses,
The crowd that closes in behind ... — William Butler Yeats

I hear it in the deep heart's core. — William Butler Yeats

The poet is a good citizen turned inside out. — William Butler Yeats

O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed. — William Butler Yeats

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

When a man grows old his joy
Grows more deep day after day,
His empty heart is full at length
But he has need of all that strength
Because of the increasing Night
That opens her mystery and fright. — William Butler Yeats