# Did Yeats really write this?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-yeats-really-write-this/142264
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [December 12, 2002, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-yeats-really-write-this/142264 "2002-12-12T16:38:06Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@merrily](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/merrily)
#### Post date: [December 12, 2002, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-yeats-really-write-this/142264/1 "2002-12-12T16:38:06Z")
I thought I would ask this question here, inspired by this thread: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=147953#newpost](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=147953#newpost)
(Even though we haven’t nailed that one yet–but an apocryphal quote would be hard to substantiate either way.)
“Education is not filling a pail. It is lighting a fire.” --W.B. Yeats.
I looked it up in Google, but all I found was this as a quote, none giving the specific source. I googled some Yeats sites that allowed searches, and still nothing.
So: can anybody confirm if this is legit? It just doesn’t sound like him, somehow. Also, I thought I once saw this quote attributed to Piaget.
(Have some googly-moogly.)
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### Author:  [@SpoilerVirgin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SpoilerVirgin)
#### Post date: [December 12, 2002, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-yeats-really-write-this/142264/2 "2002-12-12T21:01:14Z")
After way too much time searching, I couldn’t confirm the quote origin (although every source I found did attribute it to Yeats).
My guess is that this is not a line from a poem or prose work, but something that Yeats said in one of his speeches to the Irish Senate (he made a number of speeches on the Irish educational system). You’d probably have to find a collection of the text of his speeches to be sure.