Best 534 quotes of William Butler Yeats on MyQuotes

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

Acquaintance; companion; One dear brilliant woman; The best-endowed, the elect, All by their youth undone, All, all, by that inhuman Bitter glory wrecked.

A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard A voice singing on a May Eve like this, And followed half awake and half asleep, Until she came into the Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue. And she is still there, busied with a dance Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood, Or where stars walk upon a mountain-top.

A drunkard is a dead man And all dead men are drunk.

Ah, let us kiss each other's eyes,/And laugh our love away.

A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught... Better go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones... For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set.

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more?

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.

All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.

All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

All hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will

All that could run or leap or swim Whether in wood, water or cloud, Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him.

All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.

All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.

All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it

All the stream that's roaring by Came out of a needle's eye.

All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.

All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?

All through the years of our youth Neither could have known Their own thought from the other's, We were so much at one.

A lonely impulse of delight

Although our love is waning, let us stand by the lone border of the lake once more, together in that hour of gentleness. When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.

A man in his own secret meditation / Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / In art or politics.

A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him up for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick

An age is the reversal of an age: When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone, We lived like men that watch a painted stage. What matter for the scene, the scene once gone: It had not touched our lives.

And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.

And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.

And God would bid His warfare cease, Saying all things were well; And softly make a rosy peace, A peace of Heaven with Hell.

And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.

And learn that the best thing is To change my loves while dancing And pay but a kiss for a kiss.

And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place.

And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.

And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind, Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind: I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew.

And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.

An intellectual hate is the worst.

An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

An Irish Airman foresees his Death I Know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate Those that I guard I do not love, My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; 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.