W.B. Yeats
Greatest English-language poet of the 20th century
Most quoted
"Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire?"
— from No Second Troy, 1916
"We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of O'Connell, the people of Charles Stewart Parnell."
— from Speech, 1922
"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."
— from Vacillation, 1933
All quotes by W.B. Yeats (350)
I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
An intellectual hatred is the worst.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
We are, as I am always telling my friends, but a moment in the life of the soul.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
I have been in the midst of it, and now I am out of it, and I am glad.
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song, Should know what beauty cannot keep, A dull old biddable sheep.
I have been a man of action, and I have been a man of thought, and I have been a man of dreams.
The world is a dream, a beautiful dream, and we are all dreaming it.
The heart of man is a place of many secrets.
Contemporaries of W.B. Yeats
Other Literatures born within 50 years of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939).