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Age
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An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick
-William Butler Yeats
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Grant me an old man's frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;
A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind,
An old man's eagle mind.
-William Butler Yeats, from An Acre Of Grass
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Alcohol/Alcoholism
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The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
-William Butler Yeats
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Anger
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One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
-William Butler Yeats, W. B. Yeats Memoirs
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Authors & Writing
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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
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Censorship
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I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
-William Butler Yeats
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Certainty
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The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
-William Butler Yeats
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Chaos
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Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
-William Butler Yeats
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Creativity
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A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.
-William Butler Yeats
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Death
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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
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Design
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Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
-William Butler Yeats
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Dreams
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Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
published in the collection The Wind Among the Reeds and quoted in the movie Equilibrium (2002)
-William Butler Yeats, He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, 1899
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Education
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Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
-William Butler Yeats, widely attributed: source unknown; most likely, this quotation is anonymous, or: Chinese Fortune Cookie
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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
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Family
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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
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Fanaticism
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I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.
-William Butler Yeats
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Friends
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Think where man's glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.
-William Butler Yeats
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And say my glory was I had such friends.
-William Butler Yeats
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Happiness
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Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
-William Butler Yeats
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We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
-William Butler Yeats
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Journeys
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Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.
-William Butler Yeats, The Winding Stair, 1933
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Language
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Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
-William Butler Yeats
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Literary
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You shall go with me, newly-married bride,
And gaze upon a merrier multitude.
White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds,
Feachra of the hurtling form, and him
Who is the ruler of the Western Host,
Finvara, and their Land of Heart's Desire.
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
-William Butler Yeats, Land of Heart's Desire
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Love
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A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
-William Butler Yeats
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Media
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I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
-William Butler Yeats
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Military, the
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Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
-William Butler Yeats
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Mystics, Mysticism
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Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.
-William Butler Yeats
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Perfection
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The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
-William Butler Yeats
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Philosophy
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Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.
-William Butler Yeats
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Planning
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Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
-William Butler Yeats
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Praise
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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
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Reason
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The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
-William Butler Yeats
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Remembrance
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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
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Responsibility
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In dreams begin responsibility.
-William Butler Yeats
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Rest, Leisure
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It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.
-William Butler Yeats
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Sacrifice
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Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O. When may it suffice?
-William Butler Yeats
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Time
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The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God the herdsman treads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.
-William Butler Yeats
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War
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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
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Women
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To be born woman is to know -- although they do not speak of it at school -- women must labor to be beautiful.
-William Butler Yeats
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Words
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Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
-William Butler Yeats
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Books by and about William Butler Yeats
