William Butler Yeats Quotes

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William Butler Yeats

Profession : Poet

Birth : June 13, 1865

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.

William Butler Yeats

In dreams begins responsibility.

William Butler Yeats

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

William Butler Yeats

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

William Butler Yeats

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.

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.

William Butler Yeats

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.

William Butler Yeats

The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.

William Butler Yeats

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

William Butler Yeats

Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.

William Butler Yeats

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

William Butler Yeats

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

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.

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

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.

William Butler Yeats

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.

William Butler Yeats

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