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)
The world is a song, and we are the singers.
The true beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The soul is a garden where God walks.
The only thing that is constant is change.
The world is a stage, and we are the actors.
There is no country in the world that is not in some degree governed by the dead.
We are, as a nation, too much occupied with politics, and too little with ideas.
The more you are interested in something, the more you will learn about it.
Poetry is the most beautiful way of saying things.
The soul is a terrible thing to have.
I have been in the midst of it all, and I have seen that it is not a matter of right and wrong, but of power.
The dead are not dead, but alive and with us.
We must be free, not in order to do what we like, but in order to be what we are.
The end of all wisdom is to know that the world is a dream.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty.
I believe in the reality of the spiritual world, and in the communication of the living and the dead.
The Irish mind is not logical, but imaginative.
We are no longer content to be the victims of circumstance.
The world is a dream, but it is a dream that we can change.
What the heart knows today the head will understand tomorrow.
Contemporaries of W.B. Yeats
Other Literatures born within 50 years of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939).