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Who really said it

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy

Not W. B. Yeats — an anonymous modern saying Unknown Originator unidentified · in print since 1991
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

There is no Yeats source. Several researchers have tried and failed to find this sentence anywhere in Yeats’s published work, and the earliest match Quote Investigator located ↗ is a variant that film director Oliver Stone credited to Yeats in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1991 — more than fifty years after Yeats died in 1939. The familiar wording is first documented in 1993, and the originator remains anonymous.

Last verified 27 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy” NOT W. B. Yeats. No such line has been found anywhere in Yeats's published work. Quote Investigator's earliest located match is a variant Oliver Stone credited to Yeats in the San Francisco Chronicle, 3 March 1991 — more than fifty years after Yeats died in 1939; the familiar wording is first documented in the Chicago Sun-Times, 7 March 1993. The originator remains anonymous. Via Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to W. B. Yeats. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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In context

Evoking the themes of resilience, happiness and character. Theme: "Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where it actually comes from

Popularly credited to
W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) — unsupported
Found in Yeats’s works
No. Researchers, including Yeats specialists, have failed to locate it
Earliest known match
San Francisco Chronicle, 3 March 1991 — a variant quoted by Oliver Stone
Earliest known exact wording
Chicago Sun-Times, 7 March 1993

The Townes bring to mind a description of a countryman by poet William Butler Yeats: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” Chicago Sun-Times, 7 March 1993

This is the earliest appearance of the familiar wording that Quote Investigator has located ↗, in a book review by Dolores and Roger Flaherty. The Yeats credit inside it is the unsupported part: the columnists are passing the line on, not sourcing it.

Quote Investigator: the full chronology, 1911–2009

How the line travelled

  • 1911 — Yeats writes of J. M. Synge’s love of “all that stings into life the sense of tragedy.” Real Yeats, real subject — but, as Quote Investigator notes ↗, no temporary periods of joy anywhere in it.
  • 1991 — the earliest located match: Oliver Stone, promoting his Jim Morrison film, tells the San Francisco Chronicle that Morrison reminds him of “something William Butler Yeats said about another Irishman,” then gives a variant with an “itinerant sense of joy” — per QI’s citation ↗.
  • 1993–1996 — the wording settles and the credit hardens: a Chicago Sun-Times review (1993), a Notre Dame football history (1994), a New York Times profile of a novelist who kept it on his bulletin board (1995), and an epigraph to Martha Manning’s Chasing Grace (1996), all naming Yeats. Chronology ↗.
  • 2009 onward — the searches come back empty. A columnist canvasses professors including a leading Yeats scholar and finds no original; Yeats scholar Neil Mann later files the line under misattributions ↗ as “source uncertain, but not Yeats.”

No rights status can honestly be asserted, because no origin is known. The line cannot be tied to any work by Yeats, so it is not covered by the public-domain status of his pre-1931 writing; and the earliest documented appearances are 1990s newspaper and book texts by identifiable living authors, which are themselves in copyright. Treat the sentence as an unsourced modern saying of unknown authorship.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

The fact-check

This is one of the most-shared ‘Yeats’ lines on the internet, and there is no evidence he wrote a word of it. Here is what the record actually shows.

W. B. Yeats Unsupported

Quote Investigator ↗ reports that several researchers have unsuccessfully attempted to locate the statement in Yeats’s works and calls the ascription currently unsupported. Its earliest located match is from 1991, more than fifty years after Yeats died in 1939. The line also does not appear among Wikiquote’s sourced Yeats quotations ↗.

Yeats specialists Not Yeats

Yeats scholar Neil Mann includes it in his own list of Yeats misattributions ↗ with the note “source uncertain, but not Yeats” — and offers no alternative author.

No fixed text Drifting

Quote Investigator records “itinerant sense of joy” (1991), “Being depressed…” billed as an old Irish adage (1994), “transient periods of joy” (1995 and 1996), and even “A Norwegian has an abiding sense of TRAGEDY” on a piece of gift-shop calligraphy (2001). See the chronology ↗. Sayings with a real text do not wander like this.

Mary Higgins Clark, 1996 About Yeats, not by him

In a Providence College commencement speech the novelist applied the description to Yeats rather than crediting it to him. Quote Investigator observes that a passage like that would have facilitated a misattribution through inattentiveness — while noting it has not yet found such a passage before 1991 ↗, so this is a mechanism, not a proven origin.

Quotation sites No citation

Goodreads ↗ carries it under Yeats with 573 likes and no source at all, beneath its own notice that quotes are added by the community and not verified.

Nobody knows who wrote it. Quote Investigator ↗ believes the ascription to Yeats is incorrect, suspects a citation earlier than 1991 will eventually surface, and concludes that for now the originator remains anonymous.

Context

Why this one sticks

The joke is built backwards, and that is why it travels. Tragedy is supposed to interrupt joy; here joy is the interruption, and tragedy is the load-bearing wall. It reads exactly like the kind of rueful Irish epigram Yeats could have written, which is most of what a misattribution needs.

Yeats did write about Irishness and tragedy — his 1911 essay on J. M. Synge praises Synge’s love of “all that stings into life the sense of tragedy” — but, as Quote Investigator notes ↗, he says nothing there about temporary periods of joy. The nearest real Yeats sentence is a genuine sentiment that the fake sharpens into a punchline.

Source uncertain, but not Yeats.

The 2009 search that came up empty — and the ‘Norwegian’ variant

In 2009 the Cleveland columnist Ted Diadiun went looking for the original. As Quote Investigator quotes him ↗, he searched books and the web, asked several university professors including a leading Yeats scholar, and found that some had heard of the line but none had ever seen it in an original work. His conclusion is the best short description of how quotation myths harden: thousands of people online “know” Yeats wrote it, and what they actually know is that thousands of others “know” the same thing.

The saying is also detachable from Ireland altogether. Quote Investigator records a 2001 memoir describing a framed piece of calligraphy in a Wisconsin gift shop that read “A Norwegian has an abiding sense of TRAGEDY which sustains him through temporary periods of JOY.” A line that swaps nationalities that easily was never anchored to a text.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Resilience Happiness Character

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full chronologyquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation — dated citations from 1911 to 2009, and the conclusion that the Yeats ascription is unsupported and the originator anonymous.
The Widening Gyre: Did Yeats Say That?yeatsvision.blogspot.com

Yeats scholar Neil Mann’s list of quotations wrongly pinned on Yeats; this line is flagged “source uncertain, but not Yeats.”
Wikiquote: William Butler Yeatsen.wikiquote.org

Yeats’s sourced quotations, organised by work and date — this line appears nowhere on the page.
Yeats’s works, free to readgutenberg.org

Project Gutenberg’s catalogue for “Yeats, W. B. (William Butler) 1865-1939” — the public-domain poetry and prose you can search yourself.
The Goodreads entry (no source)goodreads.com

The line credited to Yeats with 573 likes and no citation, under Goodreads’s own notice that quotes are community-added and unverified.
W. B. Yeats — biographyen.wikipedia.org

Life dates, the 1904 founding of the Abbey Theatre, the Irish Senate years and the 1923 Nobel Prize.

The wrongly credited author

About the name it gets pinned on

W. B. Yeats

1865–1939 · Irish poet & dramatist · Nobel Prize in Literature, 1923

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, County Dublin on 13 June 1865 and died at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France on 28 January 1939. He co-founded the Abbey Theatre in 1904 with Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, sat in the Irish Senate from 1922, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. He is also one of the internet’s most reliable magnets for unsourced ‘Irish’ aphorisms — a Yeats scholar’s own list of misattributions includes this line alongside ‘Education is not the filling of a pail’ and several sayings that belong to other writers entirely.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented appearances

No primary source exists. Earliest match located by Quote Investigator: Edward Guthmann, “Oliver Stone Lights a Fire,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 March 1991, p. 20 (variant wording, “itinerant sense of joy”); the familiar wording is first documented in Dolores Flaherty and Roger Flaherty, Chicago Sun-Times, 7 March 1993, p. 15. See Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Being Irish, He Had an Abiding Sense of Tragedy Which Sustained Him Through Temporary Periods of Joy,” 21 March 2023.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/being-irish-he-had-an-abiding-sense-of-tragedy-which/

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