Quotes By William Butler Yeats

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.

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

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

Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!

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

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

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

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

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

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

I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'

In dreams begins responsibility.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

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

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

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

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.

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.