Imagination Quotes by William Butler Yeats

17 Imagination quotes by William Butler Yeats

All Imagination quotes William Butler Yeats’s page

Yeats treats imagination as a portal to myth and inner truth, and these seventeen verses distill that belief into memorable lines. The selection offers a compact yet resonant sense of his poetic vision, inviting you to linger on each crafted phrase.

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The living can assist the imagination of the dead...

William Butler Yeats

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By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.

William Butler Yeats

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Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.

William Butler Yeats

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Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.

William Butler Yeats

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Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

William Butler Yeats

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Bid imagination run / Much on the Great Questioner; / What He can question, what if questioned I / Can with a fitting confidence reply.

William Butler Yeats

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The chief imagination of Christendom, Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself That he has made that hollow face of his More plain…

William Butler Yeats

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Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?

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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People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

William Butler Yeats

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My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone,…

William Butler Yeats

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A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is…

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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I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the…

William Butler Yeats

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It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear…

William Butler Yeats

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What shall I do with this absurdity- O heart, O troubled heart-this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As…

William Butler Yeats

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Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may…

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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