William Butler Yeats Quotes

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it... view

By: William Butler Yeats

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time... view

By: William Butler Yeats

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth... view

By: William Butler Yeats

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round... view

By: William Butler Yeats

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart... view

By: William Butler Yeats

One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end... view

By: William Butler Yeats

The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal.. view

By: William Butler Yeats

You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon.. view

By: William Butler Yeats

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top... view

By: William Butler Yeats

In dreams begins responsibility... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?.. view

By: William Butler Yeats

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise... view

By: William Butler Yeats

You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye.. view

By: William Butler Yeats

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself... view

By: William Butler Yeats

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep... view

By: William Butler Yeats

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry... view

By: William Butler Yeats

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams... view

By: William Butler Yeats

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart... view

By: 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... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Think where mans glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends... view

By: William Butler Yeats

There are no strangers here.. view

By: William Butler Yeats

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober... view

By: William Butler Yeats

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us... view

By: William Butler Yeats

An intellectual hatred is the worst... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand... view

By: William Butler Yeats

This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry... view

By: William Butler Yeats

But I, being poor, have only my dreams.. view

By: William Butler Yeats

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy... view

By: William Butler Yeats

Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!.. view

By: William Butler Yeats

And say my glory was I had such friends... view

By: William Butler Yeats