William Butler Yeats Quotes Slideshow

I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood--sex and the dead.
-William Butler Yeats

In dreams begins responsibility.
-William Butler Yeats

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
-William Butler Yeats

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

All empty sould tend toward extreme opinions.
-William Butler Yeats

And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
-William Butler Yeats

This country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in, and it is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am afraid that Labour disagrees with me in that. On this matter I am a crusted Tory. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says "there is no wisdom without leisure."
-William Butler Yeats

All empty sould tend toward extreme opinions.
-William Butler Yeats

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

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

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
-William Butler Yeats

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

And I am broken by their passing feet.
-William Butler Yeats

The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste.
-William Butler Yeats

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
-William Butler Yeats

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

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

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
-William Butler Yeats

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric, of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.
-William Butler Yeats

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
-William Butler Yeats

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.
-William Butler Yeats

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
-William Butler Yeats

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.
-William Butler Yeats

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 - the colleges I mean - like an opera.
-William Butler Yeats

Think where man's glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.
-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.
-William Butler Yeats

The years like great black oxen tread the world,
-William Butler Yeats

Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry.
-William Butler Yeats