William Butler Yeats Quotes

I--though heart might find relief Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief What seems most welcome in the tomb--play a predestined part. Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

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And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.

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I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.

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All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

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I would that I were an old beggar Rolling a blind pearl eye, For he cannot see my lady Go gallivanting by.

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From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.

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But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

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A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

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All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.

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A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught... Better go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones... For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set.

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The poor have very few hours in which to enjoy themselves; they must take their pleasure raw; they haven't the time to cook it.

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Wine enters through the mouth, Love, the eyes. I raise the glass to my mouth, I look at you, I sigh.

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In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.

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but one loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.

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I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.

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I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow; And then I must scrub and bake and sweep Till the stars are beginning to blink and peep; And the young lie long and dream in their bed.

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All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.

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We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.

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Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted, Their heads being turned with praise and flattery; And that is why their lovers are afraid To tell them a plain story.

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The falcon cannot hear the falconer

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