William Butler Yeats Quotes

It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat.

I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.

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.

I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.

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

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

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.

One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain. Because the mountain grass Cannot keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain.

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

only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.

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

No man has ever lived that had enough of children's gratitude or woman's love.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.

The pain others give passes away in their later kindness, but that of our own blunders, especially when they hurt our vanity, never passes away

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.

All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake.

I have found nothing half so good / As my long-planned half solitude, / Where I can sit up half the night / With some friend that has the wit.

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

Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted, Their heads being turned with praise and flattery; And that is why their lovers are afraid To tell them a plain story.

A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.

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

The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.

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

Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World! You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled. Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.

From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing. My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.

What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms?

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.

The chief imagination of Christendom, Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself That he has made that hollow face of his More plain to the mind's eye than any face But that of Christ.

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.

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember

Where there is nothing, there is God.

Myself I must remake.

Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

This great purple butterfly, In the prison of my hands, Has a learning in his eye Not a poor fool understands.

I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.