Top 500 William Butler Yeats Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.”

— William Butler Yeats

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

— William Butler Yeats

3. “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

— William Butler Yeats

4. “But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

— William Butler Yeats

5. “Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”

— William Butler Yeats

6. “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”

— William Butler Yeats

7. “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.”

— William Butler Yeats

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8. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold...”

— William Butler Yeats

9. “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

— William Butler Yeats

10. “Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.”

— William Butler Yeats

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11. “There is another world, but it is in this one.”

— William Butler Yeats

12. “Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

— William Butler Yeats

13. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

— William Butler Yeats

14. “How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”

— William Butler Yeats

15. “It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.”

— William Butler Yeats

16. “The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.”

— William Butler Yeats

17. “Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.”

— William Butler Yeats

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

— William Butler Yeats

19. “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.”

— William Butler Yeats

20. “Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.”

— William Butler Yeats

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

— William Butler Yeats

22. “In dreams begins responsibility.”

— William Butler Yeats

23. “What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.”

— William Butler Yeats

24. “Everything in nature is resurrection.”

— William Butler Yeats

25. “If what I say resonates with you, it’s merely because we’re branches of the same tree.”

— William Butler Yeats

26. “The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream.”

— William Butler Yeats

27. “Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by.”

— William Butler Yeats

28. “Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

— William Butler Yeats

29. “Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.”

— William Butler Yeats

30. “Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.”

— William Butler Yeats

31. “How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.”

— William Butler Yeats

32. “Hammer your thoughts into unity.”

— William Butler Yeats

33. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

— William Butler Yeats

34. “What can be explained is not poetry.”

— William Butler Yeats

35. “Myself I must remake.”

— William Butler Yeats

36. “All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”

— William Butler Yeats

37. “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.”

— William Butler Yeats

38. “And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey...”

— William Butler Yeats

39. “Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.”

— William Butler Yeats

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40. “A lonely impulse of delight.”

— William Butler Yeats

41. “Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die.”

— William Butler Yeats

42. “One man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”

— William Butler Yeats

43. “The winds that awakened the stars Are blowing through my blood.”

— William Butler Yeats

44. “Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.”

— William Butler Yeats

45. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

— William Butler Yeats

46. “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

47. “Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?”

— William Butler Yeats

48. “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!”

— William Butler Yeats

49. “Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.”

— William Butler Yeats

50. “Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.”

— William Butler Yeats