William Butler Yeats Quotes

494 Sourced Quotes

It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.

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
And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place....

William Butler Yeats
I have no question: It is enough, I know what fixed the station Of star and cloud. And knowing all, I cry....

William Butler Yeats
Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade...

William Butler Yeats
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

William Butler Yeats
I had a chair at every hearth,
When no one turned to see,
With 'Look at that old fellow there,
'And who may he be?

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

William Butler Yeats
Come swish around my pretty punk
And keep me dancing still
That I may stay a sober man
Although I drink my fill.

William Butler Yeats
God spreads the heavens above us like great wings, And gives a little round of deeds and days.

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
Though logic-choppers rule the town,
And every man and maid and boy
Has marked a distant object down,
An aimless joy is a pure joy....

William Butler Yeats
I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fadeand flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.

William Butler Yeats
Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand....

William Butler Yeats
Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.

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
Many times man lives and dies between his two eternities: that of race and that of Soul... A brief parting from those dear is the worst man has to fear... Though grave diggers' toil is long... They but thrust their buried men back in the human mind again.

William Butler Yeats
If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.

William Butler Yeats
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion....

William Butler Yeats
What if I bade you leave
The cavern of the mind?
There's better exercise
In the sunlight and wind.

William Butler Yeats
I have made formations of battle with Arithmetic that have put the hosts of heaven to the rout.

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

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

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

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

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