Quotes By William Butler Yeats

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.

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

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

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.

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

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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