Top 500 William Butler Yeats Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “God spreads the heavens above us like great wings, And gives a little round of deeds and days.”

— William Butler Yeats

352. “I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs, Those undreamt accidents that have made me Seeing that Fame has perished this long while, Being but a part of ancient ceremony Notorious, till all my priceless things Are but a post the passing dogs defile.”

— William Butler Yeats

353. “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

354. “I have mummy truths to tell Whereat the living mock, Though not for sober ear, For maybe all that hear Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.”

— William Butler Yeats

355. “Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told your character: Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.”

— William Butler Yeats

356. “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

357. “I sigh that kiss you, For I must own That I shall miss you When you have grown.”

— William Butler Yeats

358. “Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind, That loved his learning better than mankind, Though courteous to the worst; much falling he Brooded upon sanctity...”

— William Butler Yeats

359. “His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.”

— William Butler Yeats

360. “May we two stand, When we are dead, beyond the setting suns, A little from other shades apart, With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.”

— William Butler Yeats

361. “Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.”

— William Butler Yeats

362. “Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.”

— William Butler Yeats

363. “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

364. “Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate, Know his work or choose his mate. Poet and sculptor, do the work, Nor let the modish painter shirk.”

— William Butler Yeats

365. “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

366. “Although our love is waning, let us stand by the lone border of the lake once more, together in that hour of gentleness. When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.”

— William Butler Yeats

367. “Oh, Love is the crooked thing, there is nobody wise enough to find out all that is in it, for he will be thinking about love til the stars run away and the shadows eaten the moon...”

— William Butler Yeats

368. “A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade, Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out. It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.”

— William Butler Yeats

369. “For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.”

— William Butler Yeats

370. “Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear.”

— William Butler Yeats

371. “Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.”

— William Butler Yeats

372. “On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!”

— William Butler Yeats

373. “You who are bent, and bald, and blind, With a heavy heart and a wandering mind, Have known three centuries, poets sing, Of dalliance with a demon thing.”

— William Butler Yeats

374. “The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.”

— William Butler Yeats

375. “The poet is a good citizen turned inside out.”

— William Butler Yeats

376. “All that could run or leap or swim Whether in wood, water or cloud, Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him.”

— William Butler Yeats

377. “I knew that I had seen, had seen at last That girl my unremembering nights hold fast Or else my dreams that fly If I should rub an eye, And yet in flying fling into my meat A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat...”

— William Butler Yeats

378. “It’s certain there are trout somewhere – And maybe I shall take a trout – but I do not seem to care.”

— William Butler Yeats

379. “For what but eye and ear silence the mind With the minute particulars of mankind?”

— William Butler Yeats

380. “Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”

— William Butler Yeats

381. “O would, beloved, that you lay Under the dock-leaves in the ground, While lights were paling one by one.”

— William Butler Yeats

382. “Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.”

— William Butler Yeats

383. “But stories that live longest Are sung above the glass, And Parnell loved his country And Parnell loved his lass.”

— William Butler Yeats

384. “We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936.”

— William Butler Yeats

385. “It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.”

— William Butler Yeats

386. “There is only one romance the Soul’s.”

— William Butler Yeats

387. “There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.”

— William Butler Yeats

388. “The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves Had blotted out man’s image and his cry.”

— William Butler Yeats

389. “I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say: Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay, He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.”

— William Butler Yeats

390. “Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.”

— William Butler Yeats

391. “There are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.”

— William Butler Yeats

392. “All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?”

— William Butler Yeats

393. “Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.”

— William Butler Yeats

394. “I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?”

— William Butler Yeats

395. “I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.”

— William Butler Yeats

396. “O heart, we are old; The living beauty is for younger men: We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.”

— William Butler Yeats

397. “I would have touched it like a child But knew my finger could but have touched Cold stone and water. I grew wild, Even accusing heaven because It had set down among its laws: Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch.”

— William Butler Yeats

398. “And if joy were not on the earth, There were an end of change and birth, And Earth and Heaven and Hell would die, And in some gloomy barrow lie Folded like a frozen fly...”

— William Butler Yeats

399. “Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone...”

— William Butler Yeats

400. “O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary’s feet.”

— William Butler Yeats