W. B. Yeats Quotes
Most popular W. B. Yeats Quotes
For the good are always merry.
The painter's brush consumes his dreams.
And say my glory was I had such friends.
Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart.
The innocent and the beautiful Have no enemy but time.
Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.
When we are young, we long to tread a way none trod before.
An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick.
Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
Think like a wise man but express yourself like the common people.
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
Joy is the will which labors, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.
No man has ever lived that had enough of children's gratitude or woman's love.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Think where mans glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
Poets are the policemen of language, they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.
Whatever we build in the imagination will accomplish itself in the circumstances of our lives.
The Light of Lights Looks always on the motive, not the deed. The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.
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.
The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability.
Things said or done long years ago, Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.
Bald heads, forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair to flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
The years like great black oxen tread the world And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
