The line is not found anywhere in W. B. Yeats’s poems, plays or prose. It is traced instead to his father, the painter John Butler Yeats, in a letter dated 2 June 1909 to a Miss Grierson — a letter collected in J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922, edited by Joseph Hone. We could not open that volume to check the transcription ourselves, so the letter itself rests on secondary reporting; what is firm is that the sentence is not the poet’s.
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing” John Butler Yeats, letter of 2 June 1909, collected in J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922, ed. Joseph Hone. Commonly misattributed to his son, the poet W. B. Yeats. Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “I say it is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing or that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to W. B. Yeats. Use the credit shown above instead.
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? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
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In context
Evoking the world of John Butler Yeats — Irish portrait painter and letter-writer. Theme: "Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing". 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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Provenance
The letter behind the line
Actual author
John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), the poet’s father
Reported source
Letter to a Miss Grierson, dated 2 June 1909
Collected in
J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922
Edition cited
Ed. Joseph Hone (Faber and Faber, London, 1944; E. P. Dutton, New York, 1946); p. 121 in the 1946 New York printing
And happiness… what is it? I say it is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing or that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing. It is the primal law of all nature and the universe, and literature and art are the cosmic movements working in the conscious mind.
Letter · 2 June 1909
Transcribed by a secondary source ↗, which cites the letter as of 2 June 1909 and locates it at page 121 of the 1946 New York printing. The Hone volume is in copyright and not openly readable, so we have not checked the wording, the date or the page against the book itself. Note that the widely circulated version tidies “nor this thing or that” into “nor this thing nor that” and often replaces the full stop after “growth” with a comma.
The line is absent from the poet’s own canon. Wikiquote’s W. B. Yeats page ↗ arranges his quotations work by work and carries nothing like this sentence in any section, sourced or otherwise.
It is also absent from the freely readable prose of his father. We searched the full text of the 1917 Cuala Press Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats ↗, selected by Ezra Pound, and found no trace of it; the same is true of Essays, Irish and American (1918) and Early Memories (1923), both listed at The Online Books Page ↗.
The father-to-son drift is a documented pattern rather than a guess. Quote Investigator ↗ traced “What can be explained is not poetry” to a J. B. Yeats letter of 6 September 1915 and showed how the credit migrated to the more famous son.
What remains unchecked is the letter itself. It is said to sit at page 121 of the 1946 New York printing (E. P. Dutton) of Joseph Hone’s collection — J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922 ↗, first published by Faber and Faber in 1944 — a volume that is catalogued but not openly readable, so the page reference comes to us second hand, and nothing in evidence says the London and New York settings share a pagination.
We could not establish a public-domain footing for this wording. It is not in any of John Butler Yeats’s pre-1931 published books that we searched, and the only printing anyone cites is Joseph Hone’s collection of his letters, first published in 1944 — well after the 1931 line, and an edition we have not been able to verify contains it. One pre-1931 collection is missing from that sweep, and it is the likeliest pre-1931 home for a 1909 letter: Further Letters of John Butler Yeats, selected by Lennox Robinson (Cuala Press, 1920), which The Online Books Page lists only at HathiTrust as US-access-only — we have not searched it. Treat the wording as not cleared for reuse: if the 1944 volume is indeed its first appearance, both the letter text and the edition would be in copyright. If the letter turns out to be in the 1920 Robinson selection, the wording would be public domain.
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
How the poet got his father’s line
Search the sentence and you will find it under one name almost everywhere. What you will not find, on any of those pages, is a poem, a play, an essay or a letter it came from.
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Quote databasesW. B. Yeats no source given
AZQuotes ↗ prints the line under the poet’s name with no book, date or edition attached — the standard signature of an unsourced attribution.
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Crowd-sourced collectionsW. B. Yeats community-added
Goodreads ↗ credits the poet and names no source, under its own notice that quotes are added by members and are not verified.
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The poet’s own canonNobody — the line is simply absent not there
Wikiquote’s W. B. Yeats page ↗, which lists his quotations work by work, carries nothing resembling this sentence in any section.
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Why the swap is so easyJohn Butler Yeats → William Butler Yeats a lost initial
Father and son share the middle and last name, and the father’s letters are the family’s most quotable prose. Quote Investigator has already documented the identical drift for “What can be explained is not poetry” ↗, a line J. B. Yeats wrote in 1915.
✓The sentence is not the poet’s. It is reported as his father’s — John Butler Yeats, in a letter of 2 June 1909 said to be collected in Joseph Hone’s 1944 edition of his letters ↗, a volume we have not been able to open.
Context
Why the father keeps losing his lines to the son
John Butler Yeats was a talker who wrote his talk down. Broke, self-exiled to a New York boarding house from his late sixties, he paid his way in letters — to his son, to his daughters, to acquaintances — and those letters turned out to be the most quotable thing the family produced outside the poems. Ezra Pound selected from them for the Cuala Press in 1917; Lennox Robinson followed in 1920; Joseph Hone gathered the fullest collection in 1944.
That is exactly the condition in which attribution drifts. Two men, one surname, one of them a Nobel laureate: an aphorism lifted from ‘Yeats’s letters’ only has to lose its first initial to become the poet’s. Quote Investigator has traced precisely this slippage for another line of the father’s — “What can be explained is not poetry” ↗, written by J. B. Yeats in 1915 and now routinely hung on W. B.
Two men, one surname, one Nobel Prize. The aphorism only had to lose an initial.
What we could and could not check
Checked and clear: the sentence is in none of the three J. B. Yeats books that are freely readable online — the 1917 Cuala Press Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats selected by Ezra Pound, Essays, Irish and American (1918), or Early Memories (1923). It is also absent from Wikiquote’s sourced compilation for the poet.
Not checked: the 1944 Hone collection, where the 1909 letter is said to appear at page 121 of the 1946 New York printing. That book is catalogued at the Internet Archive ↗ but not openly readable, and we have not seen the page. Anyone with library access can settle it in a minute; until someone does, treat the letter date and page as reported rather than confirmed.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1839–1922 · Irish portrait painter and letter-writer
John Butler Yeats trained as a lawyer, abandoned it for painting, and spent most of his life chronically short of money and long on conversation. He fathered a startling household — the poet W. B. Yeats, the painter Jack B. Yeats, and the Cuala Press printers Lily and Lollie — moved to New York in 1907 and from 1909 lived out his last years in a boarding house there, where he died in 1922. His reputation now rests less on his portraits than on his letters, mined for aphorisms by Ezra Pound, Lennox Robinson and Joseph Hone in successive published selections.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922
Best available: John Butler Yeats to Miss Grierson, 2 June 1909, in J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922, ed. Joseph Hone (London: Faber and Faber, 1944; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), 121 in the 1946 printing — as transcribed by a secondary source; not verified by us against the volume.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/happiness-is-neither-virtue-nor-pleasure-nor-this-thing-nor/