William Butler Yeats Quotes

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William Butler Yeats

Profession : Poet

Birth : June 13, 1865

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

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 like an opera.

William Butler Yeats

And say my glory was I had such friends.

William Butler Yeats

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.

William Butler Yeats

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.

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

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.

William Butler Yeats

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

William Butler Yeats

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.

William Butler Yeats

Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

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.

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

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.

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats