Yeats Quotes

Yeats Quote of the day

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico Garcia Lorca.

What can be explained is not poetry.

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.

With him in defense, we could play Arthur Askey in goal. (after signing Ron Yeats)

It's just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.

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

When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well.

One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.

The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

Yeats, you need ten years in the library, but I have need of ten years in the wilderness.

I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric

Nor dread nor hope attendA dying animal