Top 500 William Butler Yeats Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “I have read somewhere that in the Emperor’s palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.”

— William Butler Yeats

152. “I pray-for fashion’s word is out And prayer comes round again- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.”

— William Butler Yeats

153. “Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.”

— William Butler Yeats

154. “BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there;.”

— William Butler Yeats

155. “I, too, await The hour of thy great wind of love and hate. When shall the stars be blown about the sky, Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?”

— William Butler Yeats

156. “I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.”

— William Butler Yeats

157. “But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good.”

— William Butler Yeats

158. “A tree there is that from its topmost bough Is half all glittering flame and half all green Abounding foliage moistened with the dew; And half is half and yet is all the scene; And half and half consume what they renew...”

— William Butler Yeats

159. “O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.”

— William Butler Yeats

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

— William Butler Yeats

161. “I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world’s eyes As though they’d wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there’s more enterprise In walking naked.”

— William Butler Yeats

162. “Come swish around my pretty punk And keep me dancing still That I may stay a sober man Although I drink my fill.”

— William Butler Yeats

163. “Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.”

— William Butler Yeats

164. “A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought...”

— William Butler Yeats

165. “A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more?”

— William Butler Yeats

166. “The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.”

— William Butler Yeats

167. “The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it.”

— William Butler Yeats

168. “If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity’s displayed: I’m looking for the face I had Before the world was made.”

— William Butler Yeats

169. “The hare grows old as she plays in the sun And gazes around her with eyes of brightness; Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done She limps along in an aged whiteness...”

— William Butler Yeats

170. “Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire, With your harmonious choir Encircle her I love and sing her into peace, That my old care may cease...”

— William Butler Yeats

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

— William Butler Yeats

172. “I say that Roger Casement Did what he had to do, He died upon the gallows But that is nothing new.”

— William Butler Yeats

173. “The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.”

— William Butler Yeats

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

— William Butler Yeats

175. “We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity.”

— William Butler Yeats

176. “A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.”

— William Butler Yeats

177. “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

178. “Nor seek, for this is also sooth, To hunger fiercely after truth, Lest all thy toiling only breeds New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth Saving in thine own heart.”

— William Butler Yeats

179. “And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew...”

— William Butler Yeats

180. “One should not lose one’s temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.”

— William Butler Yeats

181. “Though I have many words, What woman’s satisfied, I am no longer faint Because at her side? O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?”

— William Butler Yeats

182. “Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child’s laughter, a woman’s kiss.”

— William Butler Yeats

183. “I know, although when looks meet I tremble to the bone, The more I leave the door unlatched The sooner love is gone...”

— William Butler Yeats

184. “Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.”

— William Butler Yeats

185. “In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class.”

— William Butler Yeats

186. “Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.”

— William Butler Yeats

187. “Man has created death.”

— William Butler Yeats

188. “Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.”

— William Butler Yeats

189. “It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.”

— William Butler Yeats

190. “Education is not filling.”

— William Butler Yeats

191. “The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.”

— William Butler Yeats

192. “No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.”

— William Butler Yeats

193. “I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me.”

— William Butler Yeats

194. “Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?”

— William Butler Yeats

195. “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.”

— William Butler Yeats

196. “Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love’s pleasure drives his love away, The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.”

— William Butler Yeats

197. “A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote. A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat. So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote.”

— William Butler Yeats

198. “Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?”

— William Butler Yeats

199. “Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast, Drowning love’s lonely hour in deep twilight of rest...”

— William Butler Yeats

200. “Land of Heart’s Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.”

— William Butler Yeats