William Butler Yeats Quotes

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

"Out of Ireland have we come. Great hatred, little room, Maimed us at the start."

"Time to put off the world and go somewhereAnd find my health again in the sea air,"Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,"And make my soul before my pate is bare."

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

"For men improve with the years;And yet, and yet,Is this my dream, or the truth?"

"Poor men have grown to be rich men,And rich men grown to be poor again,And I am running to Paradise."

"Did that play of mine send outCertain men the English shot?"

"he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.'"

"To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful."

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

"Where, where but here have Pride and Truth,That long to give themselves for wage,To shake their wicked sides at youthRestraining reckless middle age?"

"Swift has sailed into his rest;Savage indignation thereCannot lacerate his breast."

"Speak, speak, for underneath the cover thereThe sand is running from the upper glass,And when the last grain's through, I shall be lost."

"I would mould a world of fire and dew."

"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."

"Civilization is hoped together, brought under a rule, under the semblance of peace by manifold illusion, but Man's life is thought, and he, despite his terror, cannot cease, ravening through century after century ravening, raging and uprooting, that"

"In Imagination only we find a Human Faculty that touches nature at one side, and spirit on the other. Imagination may be described as that which is sent bringing spirit to nature, entering into nature, and seemingly losing its spirit, that nature being revealed as symbol may lose the power to delude."

"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking."

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