William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist respected by many the greatest poet of the 20th century. He won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature and was the leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance.
Born in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish family, Yeats studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where, with his fellow student, the Irish writer George William Russell, he developed an interest in mystical religion and the supernatural. At 21, he abandoned art in favor of literature, wrote novels, and edited poems.
Yeats founded the Irish Literary Society in London in 1891 and another in Dublin in 1892. He then applied himself to the creation of an Irish national theatre. In London, Yeats met the great, unrequited love of his life, the nationalist-activist Maud Gonne. He wrote several plays for her, like The Countess Kathleen (1892) and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902,) in which Gonne played the title character who personified Ireland and became a rallying figure in the Irish independence movement.
Some of Yeats’s most famous poems are “Easter, 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Yeats’s poems simultaneously dramatize and ironize the allure of escape from the burdens of modern living. Other famous poems explored his hopeless love for Gonne.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Butler Yeats
Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.
—William Butler Yeats
We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Self-Discovery
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.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Aging, Time, Time Management
The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk, they’re sober.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Drinking
The pain that others give passes away in their later kindness, but that of our own blunders, especially when they hurt our vanity, never passes away.
—William Butler Yeats
The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Motivation, Light
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Reason, Heart
I think it better that in times like these a poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: War
True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Love
I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Family
Joy is the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Happiness
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Age, Aging
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed up on the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Change, Certainty
To be born woman is to know—although they do not speak of it at school—women must labor to be beautiful.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Women
Education is not filling a pail but lighting a fire.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Education, Love
Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Journeys
A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Creativity
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
Thats all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Wine
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Education, Motivation
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Dance
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.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Death and Dying, Death
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.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Praise
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Love
The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol
One should not lose one’s temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Anger
I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic’s heart.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Fanaticism
In dreams begins responsibility.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Dreams
Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Design
In dreams begin responsibilities.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Responsibility, Dreams
Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Art
Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave?. Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Romance
Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Courage, Self-Discovery
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Planning, Preparation
It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says “there is no wisdom without leisure.”
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Rest, Leisure
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.
—William Butler Yeats
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Censorship
From our birthday, until we die, is but the winking of an eye.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Birthdays
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.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Words
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