Quotes from William Butler Yeats

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.

That is no country for old men. The youngIn one another's arms, birds in the trees—Those dying generations—at their song,The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer longWhatever is begotten, born, and dies.Caught in that sensual music all neglectMonuments of unaging intellect.

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways.

Much did I rage when young,Being by the world oppressed,But now with flattering tongueIt speeds the parting guest.

I gave what other women gaveThat stepped out of their clothes,But when this soul, its body off,Naked to naked goes,He it has found shall find thereinWhat none other knows.

The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,And nodding by the fire, take down this book.

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thoughtAll that we did, all that we said or sangMust come from contact with the soil, from thatContact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with.

Now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

For to articulate sweet sounds togetherIs to work harder than all these, and yetBe thought an idler by the noisy setOf bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymenThe martyrs call the world.

I had wild Jack for a lover.

O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head,You'd know the folly of being comforted.

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 man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.

An old man's eagle mind.

The friends that have it I do wrongWhen ever I remake a songShould know what issue is at stake,It is myself that I remake.

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.

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

An intellectual hate is the worst.

And say my glory was I had such friends.

Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else. Ralph Waldo Emerson American essayist, lecturer and poet (1803-1882)

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God the herdsman treads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

Things fall apart the center cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.