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Heart Quotes by William Butler Yeats

53 Heart quotes by William Butler Yeats

All Heart quotes William Butler Yeats’s page

Yeats paints the heart as a vessel for love and poetry. He speaks of hearts beating together, of beauty as a purpose, and of a deep, aging joy that fills an empty heart. He also imagines the heart soaring like white birds over sea foam, turning feeling into rhyme.

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I hear it in the deep heart's core.

William Butler Yeats

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Hearts are not had as a gift, But hearts are earned...

William Butler Yeats

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A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

William Butler Yeats

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Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.

William Butler Yeats

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A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.

William Butler Yeats

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Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

William Butler Yeats

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I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.

William Butler Yeats

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only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.

William Butler Yeats

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O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary's feet.

William Butler Yeats

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How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?

William Butler Yeats

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O heart, we are old; The living beauty is for younger men: We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

William Butler Yeats

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How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ?

William Butler Yeats

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Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

William Butler Yeats

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Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.

William Butler Yeats

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The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of…

William Butler Yeats

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The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

William Butler Yeats

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If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words…

William Butler Yeats

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I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,…

William Butler Yeats

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I--though heart might find relief Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief What seems most welcome in the…

William Butler Yeats

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A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade, Should…

William Butler Yeats

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The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold, And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes, For they will…

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

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I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind, I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had, But O! my…

William Butler Yeats

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All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of…

William Butler Yeats

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The Mask "Put off that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes." "O no, my dear, you make so bold To find…

William Butler Yeats

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To sit beside the board and drink good wine And watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire And feel content and…

William Butler Yeats

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Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling…

William Butler Yeats

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...Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World! You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled Upon the wharves…

William Butler Yeats

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I have nothing more to give you than my heart. Spanish saying Hearts are not to be had as a gift hearts…

William Butler Yeats

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Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a…

William Butler Yeats

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I broke my heart in two So hard I struck. What matter? for I know That out of rock, Out of a…

William Butler Yeats

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How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

William Butler Yeats

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O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.

William Butler Yeats

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Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?

William Butler Yeats

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The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of…

William Butler Yeats

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I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's…

William Butler Yeats

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Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

William Butler Yeats

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I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them…

William Butler Yeats

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Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.

William Butler Yeats

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O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.

William Butler Yeats

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More by William Butler Yeats

Time can but make her beauty over again.

William Butler Yeats

I would have touched it like a child But knew my finger could but have touched Cold stone and water. I grew wild, Even…

William Butler Yeats

You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no…

William Butler Yeats

Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast, Drowning love's lonely hour…

William Butler Yeats

That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.

William Butler Yeats

I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.

William Butler Yeats

Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

William Butler Yeats

We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.

William Butler Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I…

William Butler Yeats

Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the…

William Butler Yeats

Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving…

William Butler Yeats

His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

William Butler Yeats

We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women…

William Butler Yeats

Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action,…

William Butler Yeats

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide,…

William Butler Yeats