Top 44 William Butler Yeats Quotes

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.

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

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.

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

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

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

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.

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.

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

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

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

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

Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.

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.

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

In dreams begins responsibility.

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

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

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.

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

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.