Top 500 William Butler Yeats Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

— William Butler Yeats

52. “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.”

— William Butler Yeats

53. “And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.”

— William Butler Yeats

54. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

— William Butler Yeats

55. “I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.”

— William Butler Yeats

56. “I heard the old, old, men say ‘all that’s beautiful drifts away, like the waters.’”

— William Butler Yeats

57. “From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.”

— William Butler Yeats

58. “Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun Now I may wither into the truth.”

— William Butler Yeats

59. “Literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.”

— William Butler Yeats

60. “I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams.”

— William Butler Yeats

61. “The old priest Peter Gilligan Was weary night and day; For half his flock were in their beds, Or under green sods lay.”

— William Butler Yeats

62. “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

— William Butler Yeats

63. “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

— William Butler Yeats

64. “Florence Farr once said to me, If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, ‘this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know,’ we could die upon the instant and be united with God.”

— William Butler Yeats

65. “All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.”

— William Butler Yeats

66. “Thought is a garment and the soul’s a bride That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide: Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.”

— William Butler Yeats

67. “By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.”

— William Butler Yeats

68. “The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.”

— William Butler Yeats

69. “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.”

— William Butler Yeats

70. “We are fastened to a dying animal.”

— William Butler Yeats

71. “I have nothing more to give you than my heart. Spanish saying Hearts are not to be had as a gift hearts are to be earned...”

— William Butler Yeats

72. “What were all the world’s alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen’s arms?”

— William Butler Yeats

73. “We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.”

— William Butler Yeats

74. “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.”

— William Butler Yeats

75. “We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.”

— William Butler Yeats

76. “Farewell – farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.”

— William Butler Yeats

77. “The friends that have I do it wrong Whenever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.”

— William Butler Yeats

78. “The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.”

— William Butler Yeats

79. “My temptation is quiet. Here at life’s end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.”

— William Butler Yeats

80. “Hearts are not had as a gift, But hearts are earned...”

— William Butler Yeats

81. “Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.”

— William Butler Yeats

82. “Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns? I have been changed to a hound with one red ear; I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns...”

— William Butler Yeats

83. “The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away.”

— William Butler Yeats

84. “Things said or done long years ago Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.”

— William Butler Yeats

85. “There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.”

— William Butler Yeats

86. “Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul.”

— William Butler Yeats

87. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

— William Butler Yeats

88. “What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There’s better exercise In the sunlight and wind.”

— William Butler Yeats

89. “How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?”

— William Butler Yeats

90. “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

91. “The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

— William Butler Yeats

92. “One should say before sleeping: I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knee and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.”

— William Butler Yeats

93. “I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one’s self.”

— William Butler Yeats

94. “Our words must seem to be inevitable.”

— William Butler Yeats

95. “We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.”

— William Butler Yeats

96. “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.”

— William Butler Yeats

97. “I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.”

— William Butler Yeats

98. “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.”

— William Butler Yeats

99. “I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood; And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes...”

— William Butler Yeats

100. “Come near; I would, before my time to go, Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.”

— William Butler Yeats