1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

Though I have many words, What woman's satisfied, I am no longer faint Because at her side? O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?

A lonely impulse of delight

Education is not about filling a pail, it's about lighting a fire.

No expectation fails there,No pleasing habit ends,No man grows old, no girl grows cold,But friends walk by friends.

In Imagination only we find a Human Faculty that touches nature at one side, and spirit on the other. Imagination may be described as that which is sent bringing spirit to nature, entering into nature, and seemingly losing its spirit, that nature being revealed as symbol may lose the power to delude.

All through the years of our youth Neither could have known Their own thought from the other's, We were so much at one.

I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.

Oh, Love is the crooked thing, there is nobody wise enough to find out all that is in it, for he will be thinking about love til the stars run away and the shadows eaten the moon..