William Butler Yeats Quotes

494 Sourced Quotes

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
How could passion run so deep
Had I never thought
That the crime of being born
Blackens all our lot?

William Butler Yeats
Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath,
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night....

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
O would, beloved, that you lay
Under the dock-leaves in the ground,
While lights were paling one by one.

William Butler Yeats
What can be shown?
What true love be?
All could be known or shown
If Time were but gone.

William Butler Yeats
Nor bird nor beast
Could make me wish for anything this day,
Being old, but that the old alone might die,
And that would be against God's Providence.

William Butler Yeats
I had this thought a while ago,
"My darling cannot understand
What I have done, or what would do
In this blind bitter land."
And I grew weary of the sun

William Butler Yeats
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
Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk

William Butler Yeats
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
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
I had discovered, early in my researches, that their doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself.

William Butler Yeats
O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host
Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet.

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
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
Because the priest must have like every dog his day
Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon,
We and our dolls being but the world were best away.

William Butler Yeats
Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power.

William Butler Yeats
Though I have many words,
What woman's satisfied,
I am no longer faint
Because at her side?
O who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?

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

William Butler Yeats
While Michael Angelo's Sistine roof,
His "Morning" and his "Night" disclose
How sinew that has been pulled tight,
Or it may be loosened in repose,
Can rule by supernatural right
Yet be but sinew.

William Butler Yeats
The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,
And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,
For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,
With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold....

William Butler Yeats
Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.

William Butler Yeats
.. you may think I waste my breath
Pretending that there can be passion
That has more life in it than death

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
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
Laughter not time destroyed my voice
And put that crack in it,
And when the moon's pot-bellied
I get a laughing fit....

William Butler Yeats
The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away.

William Butler Yeats
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

William Butler Yeats
For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

William Butler Yeats