William Butler Yeats Quotes

494 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
I bear a burden that might well try
Men that do all by rule,
And what can I
That am a wandering-witted fool
But pray to God that He ease
My great responsibilities?

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
When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.

William Butler Yeats
Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it.

William Butler Yeats
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew....

William Butler Yeats
And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.

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
Give to these children, new from the world,
Rest far from men.
Is anything better, anything better?
Tell us it then....

William Butler Yeats
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still;
Go to the guards of the heavenly fold
And bid them wander obeying your will,
Flame under flame, till Time be no more....

William Butler Yeats
Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted,
Their heads being turned with praise and flattery;
And that is why their lovers are afraid
To tell them a plain story.

William Butler Yeats
Overcome the Empyrean; hurl
Heaven and Earth out of their places,
That in the same calamity
Brother and brother, friend and friend,
Family and family,
City and city may contend.

William Butler Yeats
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart.

William Butler Yeats
But stories that live longest
Are sung above the glass,
And Parnell loved his country
And Parnell loved his lass.

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
The hare grows old as she plays in the sun
And gazes around her with eyes of brightness;
Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done
She limps along in an aged whiteness....

William Butler Yeats
All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.

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 we are high and airy hundreds say
That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place,
While those same hundreds mock another day
Because we have made our art of common things...

William Butler Yeats
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
We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty...

William Butler Yeats
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