William Butler Yeats Quotes

William Butler Yeats - “Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.”

William Butler Yeats - “Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.”

William Butler Yeats - “What shall I do for pretty girls Now my old bawd is dead?”

William Butler Yeats - “We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936”

William Butler Yeats - “Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.”

William Butler Yeats - “O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance.”

William Butler Yeats - “Now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

William Butler Yeats - “Nothing that we love overmuch Is ponderable to our touch.”

William Butler Yeats - “No man has ever lived that had enough Of children's gratitude or woman's love.”

10.

William Butler Yeats - “Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

11.

William Butler Yeats - “Hands, do what you're bid: Bring the balloon of the mind That bellies and drags in the wind Into its narrow shed.”

12.

William Butler Yeats - “Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire.”

13.

William Butler Yeats - “Come let us mock at the great That had such burdens on the mind And toiled so hard and late To leave some monument behind, Nor thought of the leveling wind.”

14.

William Butler Yeats - “Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.”

15.

William Butler Yeats - “She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears. 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.”

16.

William Butler Yeats - “Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.”

17.

William Butler Yeats - “Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.”

18.

William Butler Yeats - “Words alone are certain good.”

19.

William Butler Yeats - “Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun Now I may wither into the truth.”

20.

William Butler Yeats - “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.”

21.

William Butler Yeats - “Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine-and-fifty swans.”

22.

William Butler Yeats - “But what is Whiggery? A leveling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of a drunkard's eye.”

23.

William Butler Yeats - “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.”

24.

William Butler Yeats - “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; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face. And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. When you are Old.”

25.

William Butler Yeats - “The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.”

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