Words matter. These are the best William Butler Yeats Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood – sex and the dead.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.
The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought – asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!
There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.
Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die.
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.
This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher.
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.
Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
To be born woman is to know – although they do not speak of it at school – women must labor to be beautiful.
We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
I heard the old, old, men say ‘all that’s beautiful drifts away, like the waters.’
Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.
Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.
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.
Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
