William Butler Yeats Quotes

“Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.”

“That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.”

“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.”

“. . . you may think I waste my breathPretending that there can be passionThat has more life in it than death”

“The women that I picked spoke sweet and lowAnd yet gave tongue. "Hound voices" were they all.”

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

“How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?”

“yet it seemsLife 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.”

“The Muse is mute when public menApplaud a modern throne.”

“Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.”

“Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.”

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

“on the instant clamorous eaves,A climbing moon upon an empty sky,And all that lamentation of the leaves,Could but compose man's image and his cry.”

“The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain,The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord,Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred,Troy backed its Helen, Troy died and adored;Great nations blossom above,A slave bows down to a slave.”

“Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk”

“What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.”

“All that I have said and done,Now that I am old and ill,Turns into a question tillI lie awake night after nightAnd never get the answers right.”

“Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.”

“There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.”

“Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.”

“All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.”

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

“How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ?”

“Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power.”

“I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?”