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I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher.

William Butler Yeats

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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
Even
Swings
Every
Believed
Believe
Higher
Make
Show
Good
Shows
Men
Best
Find
Lantern
Enough
Lanterns

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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I, too, await The hour of thy great wind of love and hate. When shall the stars be blown about the sky, Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?
William Butler Yeats
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Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
William Butler Yeats
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Nor seek, for this is also sooth, To hunger fiercely after truth, Lest all thy toiling only breeds New dreams, new dreams there is no truth Saving in thine own heart.
William Butler Yeats
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Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
William Butler Yeats
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And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
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 After the red-rose-bordered hem.
William Butler Yeats
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How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
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 God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.
William Butler Yeats
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I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.
William Butler Yeats
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I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.
William Butler Yeats
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We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity.
William Butler Yeats
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All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.
William Butler Yeats
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The unpurged images of day recede The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.
William Butler Yeats
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The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
William Butler Yeats
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Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains As though to choose whatever shape it wills.
William Butler Yeats
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The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
William Butler Yeats
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I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?
William Butler Yeats
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I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fadeand flee And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky, Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.
William Butler Yeats