W.B. Yeats Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.

Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child's laughter, a woman's kiss.

Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?

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

Though leaves are many, the root is one.

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

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

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.

Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

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

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

Now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

yet it seems Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind, Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams, But the torn petals strew the garden plot; And there's but common greenness after that.

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

Cuchulain stirred, Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard The cars of battle and his own name cried; And fought with the invulnerable tide.

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.

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

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

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.

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

I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

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

I Sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again.

I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self.

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

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave on the sea.

It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.

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

And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.

Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.

A man in his own secret meditation / Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / In art or politics.

I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English.

O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

Florence Farr once said to me, If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, 'this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know,' we could die upon the instant and be united with God.

Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

Tis the eternal law, That first in beauty should be first in might.

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