1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.

I sat on cushioned otter-skin: My word was law from Ith to Emain, And shook at Invar Amargin The hearts of the world-troubling seamen, And drove tumult and war away...

Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.

I – love’s skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb – Shall leap into the light lost In my mother’s womb.

All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it.

Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.

All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.

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?

Many times man lives and dies Betweeen his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man die in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead.