William Butler Yeats Quotes



    “Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.”
- W.B. Yeats


    “There is another world, but it is in this one.”
- W.B. Yeats


    “In dreams begin responsibilities.”
- W.B. Yeats 

     “...I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made...”
- W.B. Yeats


     “For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run awayAnd the shadows eaten the moon.”
- W.B. Yeats, 

    “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
- W.B. Yeats

    “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
- W.B. Yeats


    “What can be explained is not poetry.”
- W.B. Yeats


    “There are no strangers, only friends you have not met yet.”
- W.B. Yeats


     “Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned By those who are not entirely beautiful.”
- W.B. Yeats

    “To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart”
- W.B. Yeats

    “All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.”
- W.B. Yeats

     “Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.”
- W.B. Yeats


    “I whispered, 'I am too young,' and then, 'I am old enough'; wherefore I threw a penny to find out if I might love.”
- W.B. Yeats

     “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
- W.B. Yeats 

     “Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.”
- W.B. Yeats

     “We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.”
- W.B. Yeats


    “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”
- W.B. Yeats

    “Hearts are not to be had as a gift, hearts are to be earned.”
- W.B. Yeats


     “The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”
- W.B. Yeats


     “People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. ”
- W.B. Yeats

     “It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is”
- W.B. Yeats

     “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
- W.B. Yeats


    “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.”
- W.B. Yeats

    “I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown.”
- W.B. Yeats


    “Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.”
- W.B. Yeats

    “And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings...”
- W.B. Yeats

     “I must lie down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”
- W.B. Yeats

     “Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.”
- W.B. Yeats


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


    “I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.”
- W.B. Yeats


    “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats


    “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.”
― W.B. Yeats


     “All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
W.B. Yeats 


     “Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.”
- W.B. Yeats

     “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.
W.B. Yeats


    “Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.
W.B. Yeats


   “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”
- W.B. Yeats

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


    “The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
W.B. Yeats