Following is our list of the most famous yeats quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational yeats quotes. Hopefully, these yeats quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your yeats knowledge!
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. — J. Courtney Sullivan
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being. Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. — Stephen Spender
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. — Alfred Lord Tennyson
Souls of poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
Have ye tippled drink more fine
Than mine host's Canary wine? — John Keats
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. — Thomas Gray
I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
when the winds are breathing low,
and the stars are shining bright. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
The mind of a poet often performs miracles-a few coarse-grained words, apprehended become bullets and roses. — Amado V. Hernandez
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton — Bill Vaughan
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it — Gustave Flaubert
But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. — William Butler Yeats
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy. — William Butler Yeats
Listen! the wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves, we have had our summer evenings, now for October eves! — Humbert Wolfe
Short Yeats Quotes
My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico Garcia Lorca. — Leonard Cohen
I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats. — John Berryman
With him in defense, we could play Arthur Askey in goal.
(after signing Ron Yeats) — Bill Shankly
Yeats, you need ten years in the library, but I have need of ten years in the wilderness. — Lionel Johnson
I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do. — Lucian Freud
There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future. — John F. Kennedy
Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas? — Richard Dawkins
Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language. — T. S. Eliot
I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats is enough for me. — Linda Hamilton
Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost. — Anne Stevenson
... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art. — Cynthia Ozick
The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats. — Reynolds Price
Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. — W. H. Auden
It's just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. — Haruki Murakami
When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well. — Jean-Luc Godard
One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium. — Edward Abbey
Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil — William Butler Yeats
I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had. — Samuel Beckett
I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." — Robert Hass
[William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know. — Allen Ginsberg
Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake. — Hal Duncan
I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it. — Patti Smith
W. B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal. — Robert Wilson Lynd
On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there. — Michael Cunningham
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that. — Diane Wakoski
The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination. — Brad Blanton
The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back. — David Nicholls
And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical. — Andrew Clements
The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories. — Hector Hugh Munro
In Conclusion
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