W.B. Yeats Quotes: 16

• I have spread my dreams under your feet.Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

• Come away, O human child!To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

  The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

• Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,Enwrought with golden and silver light,The blue and the dim and the dark clothsOf night and light and the half light,I would spread the cloths under your feet:But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  The Wind Among the Reeds

• Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

• What can be explained is not poetry.

• Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

• Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

  The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

• How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

  The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

• I bring you with reverent handsThe books of my numberless dreams.

  The Wind Among the Reeds

• To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart

• Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

• When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

  The Collected Poems of W.B. 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 guard I do not love.

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

• I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.

  The Winding Stair and Other Poems

• Nor dread nor hope attendA dying animal;A man awaits his endDreading and hoping all.