William Butler Yeats Quotes

494 Sourced Quotes

The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.

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

William Butler Yeats
We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.

William Butler Yeats
Let the new faces play what tricks they will
In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,
Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,
The living seem more shadowy than they.

William Butler Yeats
We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.

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
While man can still his body keep
Wine or love drug him to sleep,
Waking he thanks the Lord that he
Has body and its stupidity....

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
The women that I picked spoke sweet and low
And yet gave tongue. "Hound voices" were they all.

William Butler Yeats
I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,
I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had,
But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;
I ran, I ran, from my love's side because my Heart went mad.

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

William Butler Yeats
What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?

William Butler Yeats
I Sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again...

William Butler Yeats
It's certain there are trout somewhere - And maybe I shall take a trout - but I do not seem to care.

William Butler Yeats
The common breeds the common,
A lout begets a lout,
So when I take on half a score
I knock their heads about.

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

William Butler Yeats
My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Ere Time transfigured me.

William Butler Yeats
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.

William Butler Yeats
All men live in suffering
I know as few can know,
Whether they take the upper road
Or stay content on the low....

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
The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain,
The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord,
Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred,
Troy backed its Helen, Troy died and adored;
Great nations blossom above,
A slave bows down to a slave.

William Butler Yeats
I know of the leafy paths that the witches take
Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,
And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake....

William Butler Yeats
Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire,
With your harmonious choir
Encircle her I love and sing her into peace,
That my old care may cease....

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
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
The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!

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

William Butler Yeats
Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.

William Butler Yeats
And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey....

William Butler Yeats