Top 500 William Butler Yeats Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there Stood in the circuit of a needle’s eye.”

— William Butler Yeats

452. “All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art’s sake.”

— William Butler Yeats

453. “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.”

— William Butler Yeats

454. “Who mocks at music mocks at love.”

— William Butler Yeats

455. “A spot whereon the founders lived and died Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees, Or gardens rich in memory glorified Marriages, alliances, and families, And every bride’s ambition satisfied.”

— William Butler Yeats

456. “No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.”

— William Butler Yeats

457. “I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English.”

— William Butler Yeats

458. “I think it better that in times like these a poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.”

— William Butler Yeats

459. “If soul my look and body touch, Which is the more blest?”

— William Butler Yeats

460. “Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.”

— William Butler Yeats

461. “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

462. “Nor bird nor beast Could make me wish for anything this day, Being old, but that the old alone might die, And that would be against God’s Providence.”

— William Butler Yeats

463. “Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.”

— William Butler Yeats

464. “I would that there was nothing in the world But my beloved that night and day had perished, And all that is and all that is to be, All that is not the meeting of our lips.”

— William Butler Yeats

465. “An intellectual hatred is the worst.”

— William Butler Yeats

466. “Why should the faithfullest heart most love The bitter sweetness of false faces?”

— William Butler Yeats

467. “My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.”

— William Butler Yeats

468. “What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.”

— William Butler Yeats

469. “O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.”

— William Butler Yeats

470. “You have accused me of upsetting order by my free drinks, and I have showed you that there is a more dreadful fermentation in the Sermon on the Mount than in my beer-barrels. Christ thought it in the irresponsibility of His omnipotence.”

— William Butler Yeats

471. “We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.”

— William Butler Yeats

472. “I – love’s skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb – Shall leap into the light lost In my mother’s womb.”

— William Butler Yeats

473. “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, And give his own and take his own And rule in his own right; And though it loved in misery Close and cling so tight, There’s not a bird of day that dare Extinguish that delight.”

— William Butler Yeats

474. “Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks?”

— William Butler Yeats

475. “I disagreed with him about everything, but I admired him beyond words.”

— William Butler Yeats

476. “What shall I do for pretty girls Now my old bawd is dead?”

— William Butler Yeats

477. “I don’t think the moral is good; and if any of you thuckeens go about imitating Anty in her laziness, you’ll find it won’t thrive with you as it did with her. She was beautiful beyond compare, which none of you are, and she had three powerful fairies to help her besides.”

— William Butler Yeats

478. “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

479. “Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.”

— William Butler Yeats

480. “Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it.”

— William Butler Yeats

481. “And there’s a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind, Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind: I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.”

— William Butler Yeats

482. “Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.”

— William Butler Yeats

483. “Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveler; he Served human liberty.”

— William Butler Yeats

484. “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

485. “Oh, who could have foretold That the heart grows old?”

— William Butler Yeats

486. “Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.”

— William Butler Yeats

487. “I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of ‘The Golden Age,’ Barry Pain, now a well known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older than the rest.”

— William Butler Yeats

488. “Time can but make her beauty over again.”

— William Butler Yeats

489. “Once he said to me in the height of his imperial propaganda, ‘Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing must go on. They say Ireland is not fit for self-government but that is nonsense. It is as fit as any other European country but we cannot grant it.”

— William Butler Yeats

490. “Mr. Dowler, could you go through this? Mr. Algie. Don’t answer him, Dowler; he’s going beyond all bounds. Paul Ruttledge. I was a rich man and I could not, and yet I am something smaller than a camel, and this is something larger than a needle’s eye.”

— William Butler Yeats

491. “And learn that the best thing is To change my loves while dancing And pay but a kiss for a kiss.”

— William Butler Yeats

492. “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.”

— William Butler Yeats

493. “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

494. “It’s certain there is no fine thing Since Adam’s fall but needs much laboring.”

— William Butler Yeats

495. “All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination.”

— William Butler Yeats

496. “It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.”

— William Butler Yeats

497. “And yet the wise are of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude.”

— William Butler Yeats

498. “I HAVE desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them.”

— William Butler Yeats

499. “Who understood Whatever has been said, sighed, sung, Howled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled, cried, crowed...”

— William Butler Yeats

500. “The poor have very few hours in which to enjoy themselves; they must take their pleasure raw; they haven’t the time to cook it.”

— William Butler Yeats