Quotes by William Butler Yeats
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
Now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
A shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead.
Man can embody truth bet he cannot know it.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.
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.
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.
The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.
We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.
A woman can be proud and stiff when on love intent; but love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement; for nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.
I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
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.
A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
