Quotes By William Butler Yeats

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

In dreams begins responsibility.

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

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

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.

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

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

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.

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

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.

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

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

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

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.

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.

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

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.