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Love Quotes by William Butler Yeats

80 Love quotes by William Butler Yeats

All Love quotes William Butler Yeats’s page

William Butler Yeats portrays love as an intimate closeness where eyes half‑close and hearts beat together. He also sees love as a thoughtful, almost scholarly pursuit that values uniqueness over action. Finally, he reminds us that love can be both beautiful and fragile, fading like a sunset.

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I hear it in the deep heart's core.

William Butler Yeats

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Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

William Butler Yeats

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Who mocks at music mocks at love.

William Butler Yeats

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Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

William Butler Yeats

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The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,

William Butler Yeats

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Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams

William Butler Yeats

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The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

William Butler Yeats

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Hammer your thoughts into unity.

William Butler Yeats

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It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline.

William Butler Yeats

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Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

William Butler Yeats

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But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

William Butler Yeats

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We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty...

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

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Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.

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

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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True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere…

William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats

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even The bed of love, that in the imagination Had seemed to be the giver of all peace, Is no more than…

William Butler Yeats

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Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire, With your harmonious choir Encircle her I love and sing her into…

William Butler Yeats

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And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

William Butler Yeats

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But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been…

William Butler Yeats

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While man can still his body keep Wine or love drug him to sleep, Waking he thanks the Lord that he Has…

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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But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough…

William Butler Yeats

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Why should I seek for love or study it? It is of God and passes human wit; I study hatred with great…

William Butler Yeats

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“To an Isle in the Water Shy one, shy one, Shy one of my heart, She moves in the firelight Pensively apart.…

William Butler Yeats

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For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry…

William Butler Yeats

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...How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the…

William Butler Yeats

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I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the…

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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I WHISPERED, 'I am too young,' And then, 'I am old enough'; Wherefore I threw a penny To find out if I…

William Butler Yeats

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Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid…

William Butler Yeats

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Love comes in at the eye.

William Butler Yeats

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And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.

William Butler Yeats

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What can I but enumerate old themes?

William Butler Yeats

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To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart

William Butler Yeats

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It seems to me that true love is a discipline.

William Butler Yeats

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When we have blamed the wind we can blame love.

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