Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O. When may it suffice?
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Sacrifice
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
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
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: Education, Colleges, Universities
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Aging, Age
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
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
We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Self-Discovery
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
Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
Grant me an old man’s frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;
A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind,
An old man’s eagle mind.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Age
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
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
Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Religion
The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk, they’re sober.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Drinking
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Instincts, Logic, Reason, Imagination
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Heart, Reason
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
From our birthday, until we die, is but the winking of an eye.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Birthdays
And say my glory was I had such friends.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Friends and Friendship
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: Certainty, Change
In dreams begin responsibilities.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Responsibility, Dreams
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 filling a pail but lighting a fire.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Education, Love
His element is so fine being sharpened by his death, to drink from the wine-breath while our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Wine
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
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
In dreams begins responsibility.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Dreams
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Joy, Growth, Happiness
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- George Bernard Shaw Irish Playwright
- George William Russell Irish Author
- Oscar Wilde Irish Poet, Playwright
- Brendan Behan Irish Poet
- Oliver Goldsmith Anglo-Irish Novelist, Poet
- James Joyce Irish Novelist
- Jonathan Swift Irish Satirist
- W. H. Auden British-born American Poet
- T. S. Eliot American-born British Poet
- Elizabeth Bowen Irish Novelist
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