1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

All men live in suffering I know as few can know, Whether they take the upper road Or stay content on the low....

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there Stood in the circuit of a needle's eye.

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.

Nor bird nor beast Could make me wish for anything this day, Being old, but that the old alone might die, And that would be against God's Providence.

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

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.