Top 44 William Butler Yeats Quotes

In this post, you will find great William Butler Yeats Quotes. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
William Butler Yeats
Think where man‘s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
And say my glory was I had such friends.
William Butler Yeats
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
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
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
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
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
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
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
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
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
Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.
William Butler Yeats
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
William Butler Yeats
But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
William Butler Yeats
How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.
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
Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.
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
But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
An intellectual hatred is the worst.
William Butler Yeats
Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?
William Butler Yeats
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
A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not see

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
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
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
The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
William Butler Yeats
Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
William Butler Yeats
You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland‘s history in their lineaments trace; think where man’s glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.
William Butler Yeats
Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
William Butler Yeats
In dreams begins responsibility.
William Butler Yeats
A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
William Butler Yeats
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
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 am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.
William Butler Yeats
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious moodsex and the dead.
William Butler Yeats