Top 500 William Butler Yeats Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “No man has ever lived that had enough of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.”

— William Butler Yeats

252. “Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.”

— William Butler Yeats

253. “The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told; I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart...”

— William Butler Yeats

254. “Whatever flames upon the night Man’s own resinous heart has fed.”

— William Butler Yeats

255. “Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on.”

— William Butler Yeats

256. “Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.”

— William Butler Yeats

257. “How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?”

— William Butler Yeats

258. “We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.”

— William Butler Yeats

259. “Things thought too long can be no longer thought, For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, And ancient lineaments are blotted out.”

— William Butler Yeats

260. “I weave the shoes of Sorrow: Soundless shall be the footfall light In all men’s ears of Sorrow, Sudden and light.”

— William Butler Yeats

261. “I know of the leafy paths that the witches take Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool, And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake...”

— William Butler Yeats

262. “What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?”

— William Butler Yeats

263. “Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.”

— William Butler Yeats

264. “I thought no more was needed Youth to prolong Than dumb-bell and foil To keep the body young. O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?”

— William Butler Yeats

265. “I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.”

— William Butler Yeats

266. “O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze...”

— William Butler Yeats

267. “Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World! You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled. Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.”

— William Butler Yeats

268. “I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window...”

— William Butler Yeats

269. “I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more...”

— William Butler Yeats

270. “This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.”

— William Butler Yeats

271. “Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun...”

— William Butler Yeats

272. “And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.”

— William Butler Yeats

273. “Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.”

— William Butler Yeats

274. “Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action, for we would not change that which we love.”

— William Butler Yeats

275. “All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman’s face, or worse – The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.”

— William Butler Yeats

276. “All men live in suffering I know as few can know, Whether they take the upper road Or stay content on the low...”

— William Butler Yeats

277. “To be born woman is to know – although they do not speak of it at school – women must labor to be beautiful.”

— William Butler Yeats

278. “I long for truth, and yet I cannot stay from that My better self disowns, For a man’s attention Brings such satisfaction To the craving in my bones.”

— William Butler Yeats

279. “Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, And Usna’s children died.”

— William Butler Yeats

280. “Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone.”

— William Butler Yeats

281. “I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head.”

— William Butler Yeats

282. “Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end...”

— William Butler Yeats

283. “A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.”

— William Butler Yeats

284. “And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.”

— William Butler Yeats

285. “The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.”

— William Butler Yeats

286. “O heart! O heart! if she’d but turn her head You’d know the folly of being comforted.”

— William Butler Yeats

287. “An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.”

— William Butler Yeats

288. “There’s keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.”

— William Butler Yeats

289. “Words alone are certain good.”

— William Butler Yeats

290. “For such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend. r.”

— William Butler Yeats

291. “I have nothing but the embittered sun; Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun.”

— William Butler Yeats

292. “The living can assist the imagination of the dead...”

— William Butler Yeats

293. “How can they know Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone, And there alone, that have no solitude? So the crowd come they care not what may come. They have loud music, hope every day renewed And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.”

— William Butler Yeats

294. “God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.”

— William Butler Yeats

295. “An age is the reversal of an age: When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone, We lived like men that watch a painted stage. What matter for the scene, the scene once gone: It had not touched our lives.”

— William Butler Yeats

296. “My wretched dragon is perplexed.”

— William Butler Yeats

297. “My chair was nearest to the fire In every company That talked of love or politics, Ere Time transfigured me.”

— William Butler Yeats

298. “Maybe the bride-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there...”

— William Butler Yeats

299. “All hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will.”

— William Butler Yeats

300. “We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother, sister of the next. Sometimes, however, a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and again.”

— William Butler Yeats