Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ places this sentence in a letter from Yeats to Lady Elizabeth Pelham dated 4 January 1939 — three weeks before he died on 28 January. That is a specific, dated source, and we have no reason to doubt it. But we could not read the letter. The standard collected edition of Yeats’s correspondence, Allan Wade’s The Letters of W. B. Yeats (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954) ↗, is access-restricted — so we could not check it, or confirm that this letter is among the ones it prints — and no open transcription was reachable elsewhere. So this page says attributed, not verified — the difference is whether we looked at the document ourselves.
“Man can embody truth but he cannot know it” W. B. Yeats, letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, 4 January 1939 (as cited by Wikiquote; the published letter not personally verified)
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In context
Evoking the world of W. B. Yeats — Irish poet, dramatist and senator · Nobel Prize in Literature, 1923. Theme: "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it". 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.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it". 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
The source
Form
Private letter
Recipient
Lady Elizabeth Pelham
Dated
4 January 1939
Standard collected letters
The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954) — not consulted; we did not confirm this letter is printed there
Read by us?
No — no open text of the letter was reachable
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
The sentence exactly as Wikiquote ↗ prints it in its sourced list. We are not able to show it in the surrounding paragraph of the letter, because we have not seen the letter.
Wikiquote’s W. B. Yeats page ↗ carries the line in its sourced section — not under “Attributed” or “Disputed” — with the citation “Letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham (4 January 1939)”. Wikiquote gives no page or edition.
We looked for the letter itself and did not find an open copy. The Internet Archive holds the 1954 Letters of W. B. Yeats edited by Allan Wade ↗, but the item is access-restricted and its text cannot be searched or read without a loan.
Yeats’s death on 28 January 1939 is not in dispute (Wikipedia ↗), which is what makes a 4 January 1939 letter his last month of writing. We have not independently confirmed that this is his final letter, and we do not claim it.
The sentence comes from a private letter written on 4 January 1939 and first published no earlier than that year. In the United States nothing published from 1931 onward is in the public domain on age alone, so this text is treated as in copyright. Yeats’s poems published before 1931 are a separate matter and many of them are public domain; this line is not one of them.
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.
Context
Why it mattered
It is a short sentence about the limit of thinking. You can be something true — live it, make it, stand for it — without ever being able to hold it in your head as a proposition. Yeats had spent forty years building elaborate systems to explain history and personality, and this reads like a man setting them down.
That is also why it gets quoted as a last word. It arrives at the very end of a life spent theorising, and it says, gently, that the theorising was never the point.
You can live a truth you will never be able to state.
Read the full story
A note on what this page does not claim. Plenty of sites call this “Yeats’s last letter” or “his final testament”. We have not verified either description, so we do not repeat them. What we can say is what Wikiquote documents: a letter, a named recipient, and the date 4 January 1939.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1865–1939 · Irish poet, dramatist and senator · Nobel Prize in Literature, 1923
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was the central figure of the Irish Literary Revival, a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, a senator of the Irish Free State and the winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. He kept writing to the end: this line comes from the first days of January 1939, and he died on the 28th of that month.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Best available citation
W. B. Yeats to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, 4 January 1939, as cited by Wikiquote. Wikiquote names no edition, and we were unable to consult the standard collected edition of Yeats’s letters (ed. Allan Wade, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954) to confirm where this letter is printed.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Man can embody truth but he cannot know it’?” Last verified 28 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/man-can-embody-truth-but-he-cannot-know-it/