William Butler Yeats Quotes (283 Quotes)

Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans.

O heart, we are old The living beauty is for younger men We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936

Unwearied still, lover by lover, They paddle in the cold Companionable streams or climb the air Their hearts have not grown old.

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.

'The sun in a golden cup' ... though not 'the moon in a silver bag,' is a quotation from the last of Mr. Ezra Pound's Cantos. W. B. YEATS.

O heart O heart if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.

Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.

Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.

I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes But when this soul, its body off Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows.

The fury and the mire of human veins.

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.

I at midnight by the clock may creep into your bed.

I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.

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.

What shall I do with this absurdity - O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave of the sea.

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.

Their hearts are wild,As be the hearts of birds, till children come.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.

The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned.

A man who does not exist,A man who is but a dream.

What do you think of when alone at nightDo not the things your mothers spoke about,Before they took the candle from the bedside,Rush up into the mind and master it,Till you believe in them against your will

One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.

All empty souls tend to extreme opinion.

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless. (William Butler Yeats described his first meeting with a Hindu philosopher at Dublin)

And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

It would need a great deal of wisdom to know what it is we want to know.

The Mask 'Put off that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes.' 'O no, my dear, you make so bold To find if hearts be wild and wise, And yet not cold.' 'I would but find what's there to find, Love or deceit.' 'It was the mask engaged your mind, And after set your heart to beat, Not what's behind.' 'But lest you are my enemy, I must enquire.' 'O no, my dear, let all that be, What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me'

All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear.

Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

Hell is the place of those who have deniedThey find there what they planted and what dug,A Lake of Spaces, and a Wood of Nothing,And wander there and drift, and never ceaseWailing for substance.

Come let us mock at the great That had such burdens on the mind And toiled so hard and late To leave some monument behind, Nor thought of the leveling wind.

Half close your eyelids, loosen your hair,And dream about the great and their prideThey have spoken against you everywhere,But weigh this song with the great and their prideI made it out of a mouthful of air,Their children's children shall say they have lied.

Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.

Time to put off the world and go somewhereAnd find my health again in the sea air,Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,And make my soul before my pate is bare.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

To me all things are made of the conflict of two states of consciousness, beings or persons which die each other's life, live each other's death. That is true of life death themselves.

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. . . . The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.

If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss For everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind delight.