W.B. Yeats Quotes

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

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.

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

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.

Where there is nothing, there is God.

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

What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms?

I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

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.

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick

The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

The women take so little stock In what I do or say They'd sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray.

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

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

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

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.

And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.

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

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

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.

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

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

Earth in beauty dressed Awaits returning spring. All true love must die, Alter at the best Into some lesser thing. Prove that I lie.

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.

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.

I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight, Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! Wine shall run thick to the end, Bread taste sour.

Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.

The Bishop has a skin, God knows, Wrinkled like the foot of a goose, (All find safety in the tomb.) Nor can he hide in holy black The heron's hunch upon his back, But a birch-tree stood my Jack.

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

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.

I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.

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.

The living can assist the imagination of the dead.

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.

The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.

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.

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

Bid imagination run / Much on the Great Questioner; / What He can question, what if questioned I / Can with a fitting confidence reply.

My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.

The hare grows old as she plays in the sun And gazes around her with eyes of brightness; Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done She limps along in an aged whiteness.

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

I had this thought a while ago, "My darling cannot understand What I have done, or what would do In this blind bitter land." And I grew weary of the sun

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