William Butler Yeats Quotes

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.

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?

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

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.

A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.

Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveler; he Served human liberty.

Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.

My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.

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

We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother, sister of the next. Sometimes, however, a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and again.

I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.

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.

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

I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young / And weep because I know all things now.

The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.

The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. . . . I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance - the revolt of the soul against the intellect.

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.

I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made.

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.

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

I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me

A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught... Better go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones... For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set.

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?