Top 500 William Butler Yeats Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember.”

— William Butler Yeats

302. “Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted, Their heads being turned with praise and flattery; And that is why their lovers are afraid To tell them a plain story.”

— William Butler Yeats

303. “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

304. “If Michael, leader of God’s host When Heaven and Hell are met, Looked down on you from Heaven’s door-post He would his deeds forget.”

— William Butler Yeats

305. “For how can you compete Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbour’s eyes?”

— William Butler Yeats

306. “Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.”

— William Butler Yeats

307. “Poetry and music I have banished, But the stupidity Of root, shoot, blossom or clay Makes no demand. I bend my body to the spade Or grope with a dirty hand.”

— William Butler Yeats

308. “Eyes spiritualised by death can judge, I cannot, but I am not content.”

— William Butler Yeats

309. “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

— William Butler Yeats

310. “All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.”

— William Butler Yeats

311. “Though leaves are many, the root is one.”

— William Butler Yeats

312. “How could passion run so deep Had I never thought That the crime of being born Blackens all our lot?”

— William Butler Yeats

313. “Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds.”

— William Butler Yeats

314. “The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold, And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes, For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies, With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold...”

— William Butler Yeats

315. “All the stream that’s roaring by Came out of a needle’s eye...”

— William Butler Yeats

316. “Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head.”

— William Butler Yeats

317. “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

318. “And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.”

— William Butler Yeats

319. “Acquaintance; companion; One dear brilliant woman; The best-endowed, the elect, All by their youth undone, All, all, by that inhuman Bitter glory wrecked.”

— William Butler Yeats

320. “The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.”

— William Butler Yeats

321. “Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought – asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.”

— William Butler Yeats

322. “What can I but enumerate old themes?”

— William Butler Yeats

323. “Style, personality – deliberately adopted and therefore a mask – is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.”

— William Butler Yeats

324. “The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam, Our arms are waving, our lips are apart...”

— William Butler Yeats

325. “What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?”

— William Butler Yeats

326. “Though pedantry denies, It’s plain the Bible means That Solomon grew wise While talking with his queens...”

— William Butler Yeats

327. “A terrible beauty is born.”

— William Butler Yeats

328. “For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon.”

— William Butler Yeats

329. “My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day’s war with every knave and dolt, Theater business, management of men.”

— William Butler Yeats

330. “Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”

— William Butler Yeats

331. “All through the years of our youth Neither could have known Their own thought from the other’s, We were so much at one.”

— William Butler Yeats

332. “I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent.”

— William Butler Yeats

333. “Civilisation is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace By manifold illusion...”

— William Butler Yeats

334. “Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing. My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”

— William Butler Yeats

335. “There is no release In a bodkin or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man’s dirty slate.”

— William Butler Yeats

336. “What do we know but that we face one another in this place?”

— William Butler Yeats

337. “While on that old grey stone I sat Under the old wind-broken tree, I knew that One is animate, Mankind inanimate phantasy.”

— William Butler Yeats

338. “I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic’s heart.”

— William Butler Yeats

339. “And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place...”

— William Butler Yeats

340. “O sweet everlasting Voices, be still; Go to the guards of the heavenly fold And bid them wander obeying your will, Flame under flame, till Time be no more...”

— William Butler Yeats

341. “The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain, The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord, Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred, Troy backed its Helen, Troy died and adored; Great nations blossom above, A slave bows down to a slave.”

— William Butler Yeats

342. “My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd. “This Land of Saints,” and then as the applause died out, “Of plaster Saints;” his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.”

— William Butler Yeats

343. “In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.”

— William Butler Yeats

344. “Let the new faces play what tricks they will In the old rooms; night can outbalance day, Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, The living seem more shadowy than they.”

— William Butler Yeats

345. “Because this age and the next age Engender in the ditch, No man can know a happy man From any passing wretch, If Folly link with Elegance No man knows which is which...”

— William Butler Yeats

346. “Men come, men go, all things remain in God.”

— William Butler Yeats

347. “Bodies of holy men and women exude Miraculous oil, odour of violet. But under heavy loads of trampled clay Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood; Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.”

— William Butler Yeats

348. “You know what the Englishman’s idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.”

— William Butler Yeats

349. “Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?”

— William Butler Yeats

350. “When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.”

— William Butler Yeats