Quote

Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.

William Butler Yeats

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Butler Yeats
Age: 73 †
Born: 1865
Born: June 13
Died: 1939
Died: January 28
Astrologer
Mystic
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Writer
Scrooby
Nottinghamshire
W. B. Yeats
William Yeats
W.B. Yeats
Attempt
Atheism
Open
Religious
Upon
Grounds
Every
Intolerance
Kind
Persecution
Way
Legislation

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

Image
I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The 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 everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.
William Butler Yeats
Image
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.
William Butler Yeats
Image
even The bed of love, that in the imagination Had seemed to be the giver of all peace, Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting, And as soon finished.
William Butler Yeats
Image
A line will take us hours maybe Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Swift has sailed into his rest Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveler he Served human liberty.
William Butler Yeats
Image
God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.
William Butler Yeats
Image
but one loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.
William Butler Yeats
Image
. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death
William Butler Yeats
Image
A spot whereon the founders lived and died Seemed once more dear than life ancestral trees, Or gardens rich in memory glorified Marriages, alliances, and families, And every bride's ambition satisfied.
William Butler Yeats
Image
All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
William Butler Yeats
Image
And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.
William Butler Yeats
Image
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats
Image
I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English.
William Butler Yeats