Art Quotes by William Butler Yeats

20 Art quotes by William Butler Yeats

All Art quotes William Butler Yeats’s page

W.B. Yeats treats art as a conduit for the eternal, and these twenty excerpts reveal his lyrical devotion to the craft. Expect a mix of mystic reverence and sharp observation that only a poet of his stature could deliver.

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I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

William Butler Yeats

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A man in his own secret meditation / Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / In art or politics.

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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No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.

William Butler Yeats

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only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.

William Butler Yeats

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Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate, Know his work or choose his…

William Butler Yeats

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Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius,…

William Butler Yeats

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Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every…

William Butler Yeats

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When we are high and airy hundreds say That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place, While those same hundreds…

William Butler Yeats

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All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image…

William Butler Yeats

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The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.

William Butler Yeats

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What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons Do, but…

William Butler Yeats

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Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths…

William Butler Yeats

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In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out…

William Butler Yeats

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Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead . . . That we descant and yet…

William Butler Yeats

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All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is…

William Butler Yeats

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All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval…

William Butler Yeats

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Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field…

William Butler Yeats

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What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?

William Butler Yeats

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There is no release In a bodkin or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's…

William Butler Yeats

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More by William Butler Yeats

Time can but make her beauty over again.

William Butler Yeats

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

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

William Butler Yeats

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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