William Butler Yeats Quotes

All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.

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Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.

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Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.

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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.

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What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.

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Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.

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This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.

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I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood; And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes.

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Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

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What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There's better exercise In the sunlight and wind.

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Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

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Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.

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He Who is wrapped in purple robes, With planets in His care, Had pity on the least of things Asleep upon a chair.

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We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.

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You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.

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A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought.

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I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

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For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

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Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

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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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