Top 500 William Butler Yeats Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher.”

— William Butler Yeats

402. “He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories.”

— William Butler Yeats

403. “Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all; Many times he died, Many times rose again. A great man in his pride Confronting murderous men Casts derision upon Supersession of breath; He knows death to the bone – Man has created death.”

— William Butler Yeats

404. “Because the priest must have like every dog his day Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon, We and our dolls being but the world were best away.”

— William Butler Yeats

405. “He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer.”

— William Butler Yeats

406. “THE REALISTS Hope that you may understand! What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly waggons Do, but awake a hope to live That had gone With the dragons?”

— William Butler Yeats

407. “When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.”

— William Butler Yeats

408. “What the world’s million lips are searching for, must be substantial somewhere.”

— William Butler Yeats

409. “He who made you bitter made you wise.”

— William Butler Yeats

410. “O hiding hair and dewy eyes, I am no more with life and death, My heart upon his warm heart lies, My breath is mixed into his breath.”

— William Butler Yeats

411. “While man can still his body keep Wine or love drug him to sleep, Waking he thanks the Lord that he Has body and its stupidity...”

— William Butler Yeats

412. “This great purple butterfly, In the prison of my hands, Has a learning in his eye Not a poor fool understands.”

— William Butler Yeats

413. “I thought it out this very day, Noon upon the clock, A man may put pretence away Who leans upon a stick, May sing, and sing until he drop, Whether to maid or hag...”

— William Butler Yeats

414. “Boughs have their fruit and blossom At all times of the year; Rivers are running over With red beer and brown beer.”

— William Butler Yeats

415. “All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.”

— William Butler Yeats

416. “Where the world ends The mind is made unchanging, for it finds Miracle, ecstasy, the impossible hope, The flagstone under all, the fire of fires, The roots of the world.”

— William Butler Yeats

417. “Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil.”

— William Butler Yeats

418. “The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!”

— William Butler Yeats

419. “I agree about Shaw – he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.”

— William Butler Yeats

420. “The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.”

— William Butler Yeats

421. “I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.”

— William Butler Yeats

422. “And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.”

— William Butler Yeats

423. “Everything we look upon is blest.”

— William Butler Yeats

424. “I will make rigid my roots and branches. It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers.”

— William Butler Yeats

425. “As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead, For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said. Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind...”

— William Butler Yeats

426. “While they danced they came over them the weariness with the world, the melancholy, the pity one for the other, which is the exultation of love.”

— William Butler Yeats

427. “Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.”

— William Butler Yeats

428. “You ask what I have found and far and wide I go, Nothing but Cromwell’s house and Cromwell’s murderous crew, The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay, And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen where are they?”

— William Butler Yeats

429. “But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough And pressed at midnighht in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.”

— William Butler Yeats

430. “In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.”

— William Butler Yeats

431. “I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes But when this soul, its body off Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows.”

— William Butler Yeats

432. “I bear a burden that might well try Men that do all by rule, And what can I That am a wandering-witted fool But pray to God that He ease My great responsibilities?”

— William Butler Yeats

433. “In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.”

— William Butler Yeats

434. “But bear in mind your lover’s wage Is what your looking-glass can show, And that he will turn green with rage At all that is not pictured there.”

— William Butler Yeats

435. “We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.”

— William Butler Yeats

436. “My soul had found All happiness in its own cause or ground. Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot Godhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot Those amorous cries that out of quiet come And must the common round of day resume.”

— William Butler Yeats

437. “Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.”

— William Butler Yeats

438. “What’s memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?”

— William Butler Yeats

439. “Come let us mock at the good That fancied goodness might be gay, And sick of solitude Might proclaim a holiday: Wind shrieked and where are they?”

— William Butler Yeats

440. “All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it.”

— William Butler Yeats

441. “If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.”

— William Butler Yeats

442. “It seems to me that love, if fine, is essentially a discipline.”

— William Butler Yeats

443. “There where the course is, Delight makes all of the one mind, The riders upon the galloping horses, The crowd that closes in behind...”

— William Butler Yeats

444. “I – though heart might find relief Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief What seems most welcome in the tomb – play a predestined part. Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.”

— William Butler Yeats

445. “When we are high and airy hundreds say That if we hold that flight they’ll leave the place, While those same hundreds mock another day Because we have made our art of common things...”

— William Butler Yeats

446. “So long as all is ordered for attack, and that alone, leaders will instinctively increase the number of enemies that they may give their followers something to do.”

— William Butler Yeats

447. “Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.”

— William Butler Yeats

448. “I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood – sex and the dead.”

— William Butler Yeats

449. “Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.”

— William Butler Yeats

450. “The women that I picked spoke sweet and low And yet gave tongue. “Hound voices” were they all.”

— William Butler Yeats