William Butler Yeats Quotes

I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other.

Getting drunk . . . you're in complete control up to a point. It's your choice, every time you take a sip. You have a lot of small choices. It's like . . . I guess it's the difference between suicide and slow capitulation . . .

No animal ever invented anything as bad as drunkenness - or so good as drink.

I had been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who got drunk - and I would have liked to have the boozing scholars of the Universities wheeled into line and properly chastised for their squalid misuse of what I must ever regard as a gift of the gods.

One that hath wine as a chain about his wits, such a one lives no life at all.

He's so full of alcohol, if you put a lighted wick in his mouth he'd burn for three days.

The drunkard is convicted by his praises of wine.

The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.

All men, even those we call savages, have been so tormented by the passion for strong drinks, that limited as their capacities were, they were yet able to manufacture them.

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.

Drown in a cold vat of whiskey? Death, where is thy sting?

Come, for my part I will have only those glorious, manly pleasures of being very drunk, and very slovenly.

But who is it that has made my people drunk? Indians cannot make whiskey. Indians do not sell it. But white people make it and bring it among us. It is they that have brought the evil upon us and we cannot remove it. The white people can remove it and now we call upon them to do it. We ask them to take their whiskey and run away, and leave us sober as they found us.

Wine is a mocker, strong drink is riotous; and whoever is deceived by it is not wise

... the sin of drunkenness which is the root of all sins.

If you are to be employed by the BBC, you must promise not to get drunk…. You look as if you will be washed out of poetry by whisky.

A drunk man is capable of every evil and prone to every temptation… Drinking renders its adherent incapable of any task

The American who drinks wine is in danger of becoming the victim of drunkenness, licentiousness, and gambling.

After all is said that can be said upon the liquor traffic, its influence is degrading upon the individual, the family, politics and business, and upon everything that you touch in this old world

I simply don't know how to act as if I am drunk.

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.

As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.

The alcoholic trance is not just a haze, as though the eyes were also unshaven. It is not a mere buzzing in the ears, a dizzinessor disturbance of balance. One arrives in the garden again, at nursery time, when the gentle animals are fed and in all the world there are only toys.

I don't drink because I have problems or I want to escape. I just love drinking and being drunk.

You're a beautiful drunk, daughter. But you're a drunk.