Irish Quotes by William Butler Yeats

8 Irish quotes by William Butler Yeats

All Irish quotes William Butler Yeats’s page

When you need a brief poetic glimpse of Irish identity, Yeats' eight verses offer a distilled taste of his lyrical insight.

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Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe…

William Butler Yeats

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Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

William Butler Yeats

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For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

William Butler Yeats

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Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed,…

William Butler Yeats

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“The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much – indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all…

William Butler Yeats

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“Romantic Ireland's dead and gone It's with O' Leary in the grave (September 1913)”

William Butler Yeats

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“Chance and Destiny have between them woven two-thirds of all history, and of the history of Ireland wellnigh the whole. The literature…

William Butler Yeats

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Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. I thirst for accusation. All that was sung. All that was said in Ireland is…

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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