Top 500 William Butler Yeats Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— William Butler Yeats

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

— William Butler Yeats

206. “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

207. “And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.”

— William Butler Yeats

208. “What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?”

— William Butler Yeats

209. “The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.”

— William Butler Yeats

210. “Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.”

— William Butler Yeats

211. “Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.”

— William Butler Yeats

212. “It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.”

— William Butler Yeats

213. “True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.”

— William Butler Yeats

214. “Tis the eternal law, That first in beauty should be first in might.”

— William Butler Yeats

215. “Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.”

— William Butler Yeats

216. “Though logic-choppers rule the town, And every man and maid and boy Has marked a distant object down, An aimless joy is a pure joy...”

— William Butler Yeats

217. “We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love.”

— William Butler Yeats

218. “You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?”

— William Butler Yeats

219. “For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.”

— William Butler Yeats

220. “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.”

— William Butler Yeats

221. “The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.”

— William Butler Yeats

222. “A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.”

— William Butler Yeats

223. “Because of something told under the famished horn Of the hunter’s moon, that hung between the night and the day, To dream of women whose beauty was folded in dismay, Even in an old story, is a burden not to be borne.”

— William Butler Yeats

224. “Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.”

— William Butler Yeats

225. “The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.”

— William Butler Yeats

226. “On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand lifted up that blest; And right between these two a girl at play That, it may be, had danced her life away...”

— William Butler Yeats

227. “Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. I thirst for accusation. All that was sung. All that was said in Ireland is a lie Breed out of the contagion of the throng, Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.”

— William Butler Yeats

228. “Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother’s reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose.”

— William Butler Yeats

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

— William Butler Yeats

230. “Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.”

— William Butler Yeats

231. “Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.”

— William Butler Yeats

232. “Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will...”

— William Butler Yeats

233. “Nothing that we love overmuch Is ponderable to our touch.”

— William Butler Yeats

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

— William Butler Yeats

235. “Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.”

— William Butler Yeats

236. “Wine enters through the mouth, Love, the eyes. I raise the glass to my mouth, I look at you, I sigh.”

— William Butler Yeats

237. “That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.”

— William Butler Yeats

238. “People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.”

— William Butler Yeats

239. “He Who is wrapped in purple robes, With planets in His care, Had pity on the least of things Asleep upon a chair.”

— William Butler Yeats

240. “Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.”

— William Butler Yeats

241. “Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.”

— William Butler Yeats

242. “Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.”

— William Butler Yeats

243. “Everything that’s lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.”

— William Butler Yeats

244. “I sat on cushioned otter-skin: My word was law from Ith to Emain, And shook at Invar Amargin The hearts of the world-troubling seamen, And drove tumult and war away...”

— William Butler Yeats

245. “I broke my heart in two So hard I struck. What matter? for I know That out of rock, Out of a desolate source, Love leaps upon its course.”

— William Butler Yeats

246. “Where there is nothing, there is God.”

— William Butler Yeats

247. “Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.”

— William Butler Yeats

248. “An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.”

— William Butler Yeats

249. “Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.”

— William Butler Yeats

250. “I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow; And then I must scrub and bake and sweep Till the stars are beginning to blink and peep; And the young lie long and dream in their bed...”

— William Butler Yeats