William Butler Yeats
73 quotes
Biography
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with John Millington Synge and Lady Gregory, founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years.
"Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die."
"I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind."
"There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met."
"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."
"I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all — the colleges I mean — like an opera."
"I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal, — that is they have ceased to be self-centered, have given up their individuality.... The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth."
"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. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words."
"You are still wrecked among heathen dreams."
"We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet."
"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."
"In dreams begins responsibility."
"Do what you will. I do not understand stops. I write my work so completely for the ear that I feel helpless when I have to measure pauses by stops & commas."
"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."
"One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: "Hammer your thoughts into unity." For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence."
"I agree about Shaw — he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor."
"This country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in, and it is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am afraid that Labour disagrees with me in that. On this matter I am a crusted Tory. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says "there is no wisdom without leisure.""
"The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste."
"Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought."
"Man can embody truth but he cannot know it."
"Words alone are certain good."
"Dream, dream, for this is also sooth."
"I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day."
"They say such different things at school."
"Seek out reality, leave things that seem."
"I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age."