Yeats, William Butler (William Butler Yeats)

Talent perceives differences, Genius unity.
-- William Butler Yeats

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

I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
-- William Butler Yeats

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
-- William Butler Yeats

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

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

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
-- William Butler 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.
-- William Butler Yeats

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
-- William Butler Yeats

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

All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare?
-- William Butler Yeats

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
-- William Butler Yeats

Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery...
-- William Butler Yeats

Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb. (III)
-- William Butler Yeats

Seek out reality, leave things that seem. (VII)
-- William Butler Yeats

Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.
-- William Butler Yeats

I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
-- William Butler Yeats

I heard the old, old men say,
'All that's beautiful drfits away
Like the waters.'
-- William Butler Yeats

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

-- William Butler Yeats

I would be ignorant as the dawn
That merely stood, rocking the glittering coach
Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses;
I would be— for no knowledge is worth a straw—
Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.
-- William Butler Yeats

Expansion of happiness is the purpose of creation.
-- William Butler Yeats

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
-- William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams...
-- William Butler Yeats

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
-- William Butler Yeats

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
-- William Butler Yeats

Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about.
-- William Butler Yeats

O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
-- William Butler Yeats

The lock is only for those who accept it.
-- William Butler Yeats

Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
-- William Butler Yeats

Technorati Tags: Quotations