William Butler Yeats Quotes

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

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Tags : William Butler Yeats Quotes , Art Quotes , Thinking Quotes

What shall I do with this absurdity- O heart, O troubled heart-this caricature, Decrepit age that has been tied to me As to a dog's tail? Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible.

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Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

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Things said or done long years ago Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.

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Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.

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When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

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I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.

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Hammer your thoughts into unity.

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Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

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In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.

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For what but eye and ear silence the mind With the minute particulars of mankind?

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I thought it out this very day, Noon upon the clock, A man may put pretence away Who leans upon a stick, May sing, and sing until he drop, Whether to maid or hag.

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My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.

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We are fastened to a dying animal.

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Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.

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Our words must seem to be inevitable.

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Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

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That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.

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Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while.

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The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.

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