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
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Motivation, Education
Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Work
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
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
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
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
Education is not filling a pail but lighting a fire.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Education, Love
From our birthday, until we die, is but the winking of an eye.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Birthdays
Florence Farr once said to me, “If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, ‘this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know,’ we could die upon the instant and be united with God”.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: The Present
Joy is the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Happiness
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
Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.
—William Butler Yeats
In dreams begins responsibility.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Dreams
Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
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
Topics: Dreams
I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic’s heart.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Fanaticism
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Dance
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
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: Leisure, Rest
And say my glory was I had such friends.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Friends and Friendship
When you are old and gray 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.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Remembrance
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
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Perfection
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
Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
—William Butler Yeats
I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Media, Journalism, Journalists
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
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, Death and Dying
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.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Colleges, Education, Universities
The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol
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