William Butler Yeats Quotes

“Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.”

“Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.”

“I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.”

“Being young you have not knownThe fool's triumph, nor yetLove lost as soon as won,Nor the best labourer deadAnd all the sheaves to bind.”

“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.”

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

“I thought no more was neededYouth to prolongThan dumb-bell and foilTo keep the body young.O who could have foretoldThat the heart grows old?”

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

“My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd."This Land of Saints," and then as the applause died out,"Of plaster Saints;" his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.”

“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.”

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

“No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.”

“I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had,But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;I ran, I ran, from my love's side because my Heart went mad.”

“Everything we look upon is blest.”

“I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.”

“Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O Never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost.”

“Though logic-choppers rule the town,And every man and maid and boyHas marked a distant object down,An aimless joy is a pure joy.”

“For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,”Here is the fiddler of Dooney!” / And dance like a wave of the sea.”

“But stories that live longestAre sung above the glass,And Parnell loved his countryAnd Parnell loved his lass.”

“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”

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

“Civilisation is hooped together, broughtUnder a rule, under the semblance of peaceBy manifold illusion.”

“True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.”

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

“Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.”