Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
Author
William Butler Yeats
42 quotations
About William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with John Millington Synge and Lady Gregory, founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature and later served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by William Butler YeatsTo be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.
If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or des…
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.
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.
Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die.
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The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
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 heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.
You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon Ireland's history in their lineaments trace think where ma…
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.
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.
Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.
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.
You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.
Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.