W.B. Yeats Quotes

“Everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.”
― William Butler Yeats, Poems

“What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.”
― W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats: Poetry

“Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.”
― William Butler Yeats, Poems

“You who are bent, and bald, and blind, With a heavy heart and a wandering mind, Have known three centuries, poets sing, Of dalliance with a demon thing.”
― W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

“No woman loves me, no man seeks my help, Because I be not of the things I dream.”
― W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

“ANASHUYA Vijaya, swear to love her never more, VIJAYA Ay, ay. ANASHUYA Swear by the parents of the gods,
Dread oath, who dwell on sacred Himalay,
On the far Golden Peak; enormous shapes,
Who still were old when the great sea was young
On their vast faces mystery and dreams;
Their hair along the mountains rolled and filled
From year to year by the unnumbered nests
Of aweless birds, and round their stirless feet
The joyous flocks of deer and antelope,
Who never hear the unforgiving hound.
Swear!”
― W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

“and that he delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the original and not as a schoolmaster reads him for the grammar.”
― W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

“Yet Henley never wholly lost that first admiration, for after Wilde’s downfall he said to me: “Why did he do it? I told my lads to attack him and yet we might have fought under his banner.”
― W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

“I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of The Golden Age, Barry Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than the rest of us.”
― W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

“Once he said to me in the height of his imperial propaganda, “Tell those young men in Ireland that this great thing must go on. They say Ireland is not fit for self-government, but that is nonsense. It is as fit as any other European country, but we cannot grant it.”
― W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

“Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its elders are so obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power.”
― W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

“For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”
― W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats

“If war is the test of reality, then all poetry is unreal; but in that case unreality is a virtue.”
― Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats

“If war is the test of reality, than all poetry is unreal; but in that case unreality is a virtue.”
― Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats