Yeats Quotes

“Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O Never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.”
― W. B. Yeats, In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age

“What can be explained is not poetry.”
― W.B. Yeats

“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is lost
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”
― W.B. Yeats

“An Irish Airman foresees his Death

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,
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Wild Swans At Coole

“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”
― W.H. Auden

“I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.”
― William Butler Yeats

“The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.”
― H.H. Munro (Saki), The Chronicles of Clovis

“By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Stop believing what you want to believe. It’s unbecoming”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?”
― William Butler Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer

“...nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.”
― William Butler Yeats

“I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Wild Swans At Coole

“Yeah, I said. If there's one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Romantic Ireland's dead and gone
It's with O' Leary in the grave
(September 1913)”
― William Butler Yeats, The Green Helmet and Other Poems

“...I was shocked and astonished when a daring little girl -- a cousin I think -- having waited under a group of trees in the avenue, where she knew [my grandfather] would pass near four o'clock on the way to his dinner, said to him, 'If I were you and you were a little girl, I would give you a doll.”
― William Butler Yeats

“He believes, but he does not believe: the impossibility of believing is the impossibility which he accepts most reluctantly, but still it is there with the other impossibilities of this world which is too full of weeping for a child to understand.”
― Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930

“Yeats was straight, but as Auden wrote in ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’: “You were silly like us.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds--who used to be a passionate Yeats fan--is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different then, and in actual fact Yeats is dead.”
― Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

“O woman shapely as a swan,
Your gunmen tread on my dreams”
― Ezra Pound, The Cantos

“Throughout their lives W.B. Yeats and C.G. Jung sought out precedents for, and affinities with, their visionary — their daimonic — standpoints. Between them they uncovered and studied just about every major proponent of our tradition. This is not surprising, because it is a feature of the tradition that it threads together all who discover it, to form a series of historical links. The alchemists called it the Aurea Catena, the Golden Chain; and to grasp one link is to be connected to all the others.”
― Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld

“Yeats knew nothing about life: it was all symbols
& Wordsworthian egotism: Yeats on Cemetery Ridge
would not have been scared, like you & me,
he would have been, before the bullet that was his,
studying the movements of the birds,
said disappointed & amazed Henry.”
― John Berryman, The Dream Songs

“يجبر العقل الإنساني على الاختيار بين الكمال في الحياة، والكمال في العمل
ومن يختر الأخير يتخلى عن قصر من النعيم، يتوهج في الظلام.

ويليام ييتس، الاختيار”
― W.B. Yeats

“We that have done and thought,
That have thought and done,
Must ramble, and thin out
Like milk spilt on a stone.”
― W. B. Yeats

“But the power in this case is real indeed. You doubt the mystery and power of these aircraft and their markings? They are aeons old and yet they still operate!”
“You’ve seen them fly? Where do they go? I am wondering if there is a city we can reach.”
“Before you woke from your coffin, they flew indeed. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. What does that suggest?”
“Um. Some rough beast is slouching toward Bethlehem waiting to be born, maybe?”
“No doubt the spirit of prophecy escapes your lips! It must be prophecy because I cannot grok what you are saying.”
“Sorry. Won’t happen again. It suggests a search pattern.”
― John C. Wright, The Judge of Ages

“Yeats decía que cuando uno tiene una disputa con el mundo, produce retórica; cuando tiene una disputa consigo mismo, produce poesía”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Viajes con un mapa en blanco

“Those who knew him said it was how he'd have wanted to go. Dieter Hess died in his armchair, surrounded by his books, a half-glass of 2008 Burgundy at his elbow, a half-smoked Montecristo in the ashtray on the floor. In his lap, Yeats's Collected - the yellow-jacketed Macmillan edition - and in the CD tray Pärt's Für Alina, long hushed by the time Bachelor found the body, but its lingering silences implicit in the air, settling like dust on faded surfaces.”
― Mick Herron, The List

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. - William Butler Yeats”
― Jake Eagle LPC, The Power of Awe: Overcome Burnout & Anxiety, Ease Chronic Pain, Find Clarity & Purpose―In Less Than 1 Minute Per Day