“People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind” People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. — John Butler Yeats, in a letter to his son W. B. Yeats, 1906 (commonly misattributed to the poet). Via Quotle.info
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Provenance
Where the line actually comes from
Attributed origin
Letter from John Butler Yeats to his son W. B. Yeats, 1906
Identified by
Neil Mann, “Did Yeats Say That? Quotable Yeats and Misattributions” (2018)
Not found in
W. B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil (1903); Essays (Macmillan, 1924)
Wikiquote
No entry on the W. B. Yeats page, sourced or otherwise
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
Family letter, 1906
No fuller context is quoted anywhere reachable: Mann prints the sentence alone, and the surrounding paragraph of the 1906 letter is not reproduced in any source located here.
Neil Mann — who has edited volumes of essays on A Vision and written A Reader’s Guide to Yeats’s “A Vision” — audited a “Top Ten Yeats Quotes” list published for the poet’s birthday and judged only four of the ten authentic. Against this one he wrote: “John Butler Yeats to his son, W. B. Yeats, in 1906” ↗.
It is in neither of the poet’s two main prose collections. Searching the full text of Ideas of Good and Evil ↗ returns no “starving”, no “rational exposition” and no “lean on logic”; a full-text search of Essays (Macmillan, 1924) ↗ returns no hit for “starving” at all. That is two books, not the whole corpus — it is Mann’s positive identification of the father, not this search, that settles who wrote the line.
The father’s letters reached print in stages, and the earliest public selection cannot cover 1906: the editor’s note to Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats ↗ (Cuala Press, 1917), chosen by Ezra Pound, states that the letters it draws on “were written to W. B. Yeats between 1911 and 1916” — and the sentence is not in that volume.
Every popular source that credits the poet cites nothing. Goodreads ↗ gives it to “William Butler Yeats” with a tag and no work, under its own notice that community-added quotes are not verified.
The sentence comes from private family correspondence, and no source consulted here identifies which published volume first printed it — so its copyright status cannot be settled. It is not in the 1917 Cuala Press selection of John Butler Yeats’s letters; the standard collected edition, J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922 ↗, edited by Joseph Hone, was published by Faber and Faber in 1944, and a first printing of that date would be in copyright in the United States. Treated as uncertain rather than 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
Right family, wrong Yeats
This is not a stranger’s line pinned on a famous name. It is a father’s line pinned on his more famous son — the easiest kind of slip to make, and the hardest to notice, because both men are “Yeats” and both wrote well.
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The line itselfW. B. Yeats, the poet Wrong Yeats
Quote sites give it to the poet with a topic tag and nothing else — Goodreads ↗ lists no work at all. Neil Mann marks it false and puts it in the father’s 1906 letter to his son.
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The same slip, twiceW. B. Yeats, the poet Also the father
Why he collects themW. B. Yeats, the poet Quote magnet
The most-shared “Yeats” line of all — “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire” — isn’t his either. Quote Investigator credits it to Plutarch ↗. James Johnson Sweeney’s Vision and Image (1968) gave that line to Plutarch and printed it beside a genuine Yeats sentence, and both Quote Investigator and Neil Mann suggest a reader misreading that juxtaposition is how it drifted — the earliest ascription to Yeats that QI can date is a 1987 quotation dictionary.
Of all the misattributions that gather around a famous name, the family kind is the most forgivable. John Butler Yeats wrote to his son constantly, in a voice built for quoting — opinionated, aphoristic, arriving in short hard sentences. When a phrase from that correspondence escapes into circulation with only the surname attached, the poet is who readers picture.
Ezra Pound saw the risk as early as 1917. Introducing his Cuala Press selection from the father’s letters, he worried that by “snatching at salient thoughts” he would make the man look “hurried, or even sententious,” when in the letters themselves “there is only the air of leisure.” A century of copy-paste quoting has done exactly what Pound feared — and then handed the results to the wrong Yeats.
“John Butler Yeats to his son, W. B. Yeats, in 1906.”
What is still unknown
Neil Mann gives the year and the correspondents but no volume or page, and no source located here reproduces the paragraph the sentence sits in. The line is not in the 1917 Cuala Press selection, whose letters run only from 1911 to 1916. Where it was first printed — and therefore whether it is out of copyright — remains open.
If you can point to the letter in a published edition of John Butler Yeats’s correspondence, with a date and a page, that would close the last gap on this page.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1839–1922 · Irish portrait painter · father of W. B. and Jack B. Yeats
John Butler Yeats trained as a lawyer, took up painting in 1867, and spent his life as a portrait painter and an inexhaustible letter-writer — father of the poet W. B. Yeats and the painter Jack B. Yeats. In 1907 he sailed to New York with his daughter Lily and never returned to Ireland, dying there in 1922. His talk-on-paper made enough of an impression that Ezra Pound culled a Cuala Press volume from it in 1917, warning in his editor’s note that snatching at “salient thoughts” risked making a preacher of a man whose letters had only “the air of leisure.”
For writers & researchers
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Cite this page
Attributed to John Butler Yeats, letter to his son W. B. Yeats, 1906, in Neil Mann, “Did Yeats Say That? Quotable Yeats and Misattributions,” The Widening Gyre (blog), 5 October 2018. Not located in W. B. Yeats’s Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903) or Essays (London: Macmillan, 1924).
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/people-who-lean-on-logic-and-philosophy-and-rational/