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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- George Bernard Shaw Irish Playwright
- George William Russell Irish Author
- Oscar Wilde Irish Poet, Playwright
- Brendan Behan Irish Poet
- Oliver Goldsmith Anglo-Irish Novelist, Poet
- James Joyce Irish Novelist
- Jonathan Swift Irish Satirist
- W. H. Auden British-born American Poet
- T. S. Eliot American-born British Poet
- Elizabeth Bowen Irish Novelist
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