91 result(s) for William Butler Yeats Quotes.
"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 minds."
"A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't."
"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 have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
"All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions."
"A line will take us hours maybe; yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught."
"I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age."
Can't find the quotes you're looking for?
"The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk, they are sober."
"The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness."
"Count where man's glory most begins and ends, and say: My glory was I had such friends."
"A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight."
"The gyres! The gyres! Old sages with their heads white and wise came running on a sudden."
"Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round."
"We taste happiness most keenly when we have experienced sorrow."
"O Chestnut Tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?"
"Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."
"I must lie down where all the ladders start in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."
"But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?"
"The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the south, Two girls in silk kimonos, both, Beautiful, one a gazelle."
"Words alone are certain good. Where are the good that we desire?"
"The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober."
Can't find the quotes you're looking for?
"It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield."
"The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."
"Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye; that's all we shall know for truth before we grow old and die."
"Life is a long preparation for something that never happens."
"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
"The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work."
"Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day."
"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."
"To be born woman is to know—Although they do not talk of it at school—That we must labour to be beautiful."
"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."
"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."
"The only two things worth living for, are to get away from that cursed background of natural commonness, carelessness, and muddlement, which is the lot of most men."
"Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction."
"The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god."
Can't find the quotes you're looking for?
"I have a thing to say to the nation: You must not creep into your shell and let a half freedom carry you onward."
"I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young And weep because I know all things now."
"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking."
"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."
"I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
"Out of the quarrel with others, we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry."
"The worst are full of passionate intensity."
"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."
"A man is original when he speaks the truth that has always been known to all good men."
"In dreams begin responsibilities."
"The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance."
"I must lie down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."
"I have learned the beginning of wisdom is never to exceed the truth, but to give it, from the first and at the last."
"Think as I think,"
"To be born woman is to know, although they do not talk of it at school, women must labor to be beautiful."
"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking."
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
"Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing."
"There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met."
"Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends."
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
"Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?"
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
"Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning."
"Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love."
"The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart."
"The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time."
"People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind."
"The problem with some people is that when they aren't drunk, they're sober."
"What can be explained is not poetry."
"An intellectual hatred is the worst."
"The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."
"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
"We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us."
"I have looked on real love as a thing that cannot be achieved, but only accepted."
"The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word."
"There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met."
"The soul of man is greater than his destiny."
"Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing."
"There is no country and no people in the world that could claim our lives and hold them against the great we were always meant to be."
"The love of drama permits a man to make a fool of himself, but the love of poetry is an abiding glory."
"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."
"We are all just individuals trying to be our best selves, but our best selves are often not good enough."
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
"The lake isle of Innisfree"
"I am no more a fiction than my books are fiction."
"Let the soul be alive to the spirit and the light shall shine."
"Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety."
"Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart."
"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."
"The fish, the fish pecking at the unborn embryos—at yesterday’s fate—a beautiful thought."
"The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it."
"You might as well laugh as not laugh at all, for it is all a great joke."
"Art is the most beautiful of all lies."
"Perhaps the greatest poetry can be expressed in very few words."
Can't find the quotes you're looking for?
