Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by William Butler Yeats (Irish Poet)

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist respected by many the greatest poet of the 20th century. He won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature and was the leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance.

Born in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish family, Yeats studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where, with his fellow student, the Irish writer George William Russell, he developed an interest in mystical religion and the supernatural. At 21, he abandoned art in favor of literature, wrote novels, and edited poems.

Yeats founded the Irish Literary Society in London in 1891 and another in Dublin in 1892. He then applied himself to the creation of an Irish national theatre. In London, Yeats met the great, unrequited love of his life, the nationalist-activist Maud Gonne. He wrote several plays for her, like The Countess Kathleen (1892) and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902,) in which Gonne played the title character who personified Ireland and became a rallying figure in the Irish independence movement.

Some of Yeats’s most famous poems are “Easter, 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Yeats’s poems simultaneously dramatize and ironize the allure of escape from the burdens of modern living. Other famous poems explored his hopeless love for Gonne.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by 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
Topics: Religion

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed up on the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Certainty, Change

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O. When may it suffice?
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Sacrifice

True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Love

The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Motivation, Light

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

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.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Time, Aging, Time Management

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Self-Discovery

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Communication, Language

Education is not filling a pail but lighting a fire.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Education, Love

In dreams begin responsibilities.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Responsibility, Dreams

Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Navy, Army, The Military

A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Creativity

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Perfection

Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.
William Butler Yeats

In dreams begins responsibility.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Dreams

It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says “there is no wisdom without leisure.”
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Leisure, Rest

To be born woman is to know—although they do not speak of it at school—women must labor to be beautiful.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Women

I think it better that in times like these a poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: War

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Heart, Reason

His element is so fine being sharpened by his death, to drink from the wine-breath while our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Wine

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Art

The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk, they’re sober.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Drinking

I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic’s heart.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Fanaticism

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Preparation, Planning

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
Thats all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Wine

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
Topics: Journalists, Media, Journalism

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Dreams

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Remembrance

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
William Butler Yeats
Topics: Instincts, Imagination, Reason, Logic

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