William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others. These William Butler Yeats quotes will motivate you.
Best William Butler Yeats Quotes
- “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote.
A journalist invents his lies and rams them down your throat.
So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote.” ~ William Butler Yeats -
“By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination, we live.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “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!” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “There is another world, but it is in this one.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Hammer your thoughts into unity.” ~ William Butler Yeats
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“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “If what I say resonates with you, it’s merely because we’re branches of the same tree.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “The winds that awakened the stars Are blowing through my blood.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream.” ~ William Butler Yeats
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“The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labor my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “In dreams begins responsibility.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.” ~ William Butler Yeats
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“We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.” ~ William Butler Yeats
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“I’m looking for the face I had before the world was made.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “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.” ~ William Butler Yeats Quotes
- “I believe… that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Where there is nothing, there is God.” ~ William Butler Yeats
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“Everything in nature is resurrection.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun Now I may wither into the truth.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “All that I have said and done,
Now that I am old and ill,
Turns into a question till
I lie awake night after night
And never get the answers right.” ~ William Butler Yeats -
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Wine enters through the mouth, Love, the eyes. I raise the glass to my mouth, I look at you, I sigh.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “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.” ~ William Butler Yeats
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“I heard the old, old, men say ‘all that’s beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “One man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.” ~ William Butler Yeats - “People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “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.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Myself I must remake.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “An intellectual hate is the worst.” ~ William Butler Yeats Quotes
- “The mystical life is the center 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.” ~ William Butler Yeats
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“What can be explained is not poetry.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Man is in love and loves
what vanishes,
What more is there to say?” ~ William Butler Yeats - “Literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “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.” ~ William Butler Yeats
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“Everything that’s lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.” ~ William Butler Yeats - “Man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality.” ~ William Butler Yeats - “And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” ~ William Butler Yeats
- “Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.” ~ William Butler Yeats
