Time Quotes by William Butler Yeats

46 Time quotes by William Butler Yeats

All Time quotes William Butler Yeats’s page

Yeats says time can restore beauty and make wisdom easier to reach. He writes that the innocent and beautiful have no enemy but time itself. He also imagines a world where silver moons and golden suns grow from time’s passing.

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Time can but make her beauty over again.

William Butler Yeats

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The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

William Butler Yeats

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The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.

William Butler Yeats

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Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.

William Butler Yeats

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Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.

William Butler Yeats

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And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.

William Butler Yeats

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What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.

William Butler Yeats

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Laughter not time destroyed my voice And put that crack in it, And when the moon's pot-bellied I get a laughing fit.

William Butler Yeats

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The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on…

William Butler Yeats

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I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to…

William Butler Yeats

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My chair was nearest to the fire In every company That talked of love or politics, Ere Time transfigured me.

William Butler Yeats

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Time can but make it easier to be wise / Though now it seems impossible, and so / All that you need is patience.

William Butler Yeats

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Boughs have their fruit and blossom At all times of the year; Rivers are running over With red beer and brown beer.

William Butler Yeats

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O sweet everlasting Voices, be still; Go to the guards of the heavenly fold And bid them wander obeying your will, Flame…

William Butler Yeats

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Many times man lives and dies between his two eternities: that of race and that of Soul... A brief parting from those…

William Butler Yeats

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“Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss…

William Butler Yeats

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Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss…

William Butler Yeats

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We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their…

William Butler Yeats

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But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked…

William Butler Yeats

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Florence Farr once said to me, If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, 'this passing moment is as good as any…

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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Many times man lives and dies Betweeen his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it…

William Butler Yeats

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A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching…

William Butler Yeats

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“O SWEET everlasting Voices, be still; Go to the guards of the heavenly fold And bid them wander obeying your will, Flame…

William Butler Yeats

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Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world, and it is…

William Butler Yeats

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“The Magi" Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied…

William Butler Yeats

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I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some…

William Butler Yeats

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“Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight,…

William Butler Yeats

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“The Song Of The Happy Shepherd The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world…

William Butler Yeats

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“THE ROSE TOTHE ROSE UPON THE ROOD OF TIME Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! Come near me,…

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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Come near; I would, before my time to go, Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad…

William Butler Yeats

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A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been…

William Butler Yeats

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In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead…

William Butler Yeats

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And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.

William Butler Yeats

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Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the…

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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Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is…

William Butler Yeats

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“I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching…

William Butler Yeats

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Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.

William Butler Yeats

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Other authors on Time

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