William Butler Yeats Quotes

494 Sourced Quotes

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 county 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 men, 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.

William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

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

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
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats
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
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
Now
I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found
Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew
When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.

William Butler Yeats
While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate phantasy.

William Butler Yeats
In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class.

William Butler Yeats
What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons
Do, but awake a hope to live...?

William Butler Yeats
An age is the reversal of an age:
When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone,
We lived like men that watch a painted stage.
What matter for the scene, the scene once gone:
It had not touched our lives.

William Butler Yeats
All the stream that's roaring by
Came out of a needle's eye....

William Butler Yeats
Things thought too long can be no longer thought, For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, And ancient lineaments are blotted out.

William Butler Yeats
When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.

William Butler Yeats
IILLE: The rhetorician would deceive his neighbors, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but a vision of reality.

William Butler Yeats
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
It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.

William Butler Yeats
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.

William Butler Yeats
He Who is wrapped in purple robes,
With planets in His care,
Had pity on the least of things
Asleep upon a chair.

William Butler Yeats
Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

William Butler Yeats
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
Because of something told under the famished horn
Of the hunter's moon, that hung between the night and the day,
To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay,
Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.

William Butler Yeats
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
What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?

William Butler Yeats
All that could run or leap or swim
Whether in wood, water or cloud,
Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him.

William Butler Yeats
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

William Butler Yeats
A speckled cat and a tame hare
Eat at my hearthstone
And sleep there;
And both look up to me alone
For learning and defence
As I look up to Providence.

William Butler Yeats
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
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