William Butler Yeats Quotes

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.

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

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.

Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.

Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.

And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.

We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

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.

A lonely impulse of delight

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.

Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.

The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

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

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.

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

Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.

By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.

Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade.

Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him up for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world, and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

One should say before sleeping: I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knee and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.

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.

It's certain there are trout somewhere - And maybe I shall take a trout - but I do not seem to care.

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

There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.

We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.

And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

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.

When You Are Old" WHEN you are old and grey 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; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Hammer your thoughts into unity.

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

And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.

A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from his deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must needs think and think.

If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf

... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.

We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love

And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.

Consume my heart away, sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is, and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.