William Butler Yeats quotes:

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

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.

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

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.

Nor dread nor hope attendA dying animal;A man awaits his endDreading and hoping all.

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.

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.

Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.

One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.

You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.

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.

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.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

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.

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

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.

I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.

Consume my heart away, sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is, and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?

There is another world, but it is in this one.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?"

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

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

Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.

The Bishop has a skin, God knows, Wrinkled like the foot of a goose, (All find safety in the tomb.) Nor can he hide in holy black The heron's hunch upon his back, But a birch-tree stood my Jack....

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

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

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.

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

I broke my heart in two So hard I struck. What matter? for I know That out of rock, Out of a desolate source, Love leaps upon its course.

We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother, sister of the next. Sometimes, however, a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and again.

Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.

Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

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

Though logic-choppers rule the town, And every man and maid and boy Has marked a distant object down, An aimless joy is a pure joy....

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

You ask what I have found and far and wide I go, Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew, The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay, And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen where are they?

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.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

Poetry and music I have banished, But the stupidity Of root, shoot, blossom or clay Makes no demand. I bend my body to the spade Or grope with a dirty hand.

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world, and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.

Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.

"Chaunt in his ear delusions magical, That he may fight the horses of the sea." The Druids took them to their mystery, And chaunted for three days.

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.

Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

When a man grows old his joy Grows more deep day after day, His empty heart is full at length But he has need of all that strength Because of the increasing Night That opens her mystery and fright.

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

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.

now I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.

Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman's gaze....

Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!

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 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.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold...

I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations-at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unaging intellect.

but one loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will....

There where the course is, Delight makes all of the one mind, The riders upon the galloping horses, The crowd that closes in behind....

...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... "When You Are Old And Gray

Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.

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.

Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.

I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?

Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.

I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.

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.

Bodies of holy men and women exude Miraculous oil, odour of violet. But under heavy loads of trampled clay Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood; Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain- beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering.

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on.

Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.

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.

That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.

There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.

I know, although when looks meet I tremble to the bone, The more I leave the door unlatched The sooner love is gone....

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.

We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.

The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.

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.

Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.

Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told your character: Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.

O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.

Being young you have not known The fool's triumph, nor yet Love lost as soon as won, Nor the best labourer dead And all the sheaves to bind.

If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.

On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul

How can they know Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone, And there alone, that have no solitude? So the crowd come they care not what may come. They have loud music, hope every day renewed And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?

The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain, The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord, Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred, Troy backed its Helen, Troy died and adored; Great nations blossom above, A slave bows down to a slave.

For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fadeand flee; And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky, Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.

While Michael Angelo's Sistine roof, His "Morning" and his "Night" disclose How sinew that has been pulled tight, Or it may be loosened in repose, Can rule by supernatural right Yet be but sinew.

The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.

Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.

O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet.

It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things; or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.