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I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
William Butler Yeats
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William Butler Yeats
Age: 73 †
Born: 1865
Born: June 13
Died: 1939
Died: January 28
Astrologer
Mystic
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Writer
Scrooby
Nottinghamshire
W. B. Yeats
William Yeats
W.B. Yeats
Waters
Heard
Beauty
Water
Away
Beautiful
Men
Like
Drifts
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick
William Butler Yeats
A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.
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Locke sank into a swoon The Garden died God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.
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And if joy were not on the earth, There were an end of change and birth, And Earth and Heaven and Hell would die, And in some gloomy barrow lie Folded like a frozen fly.
William Butler Yeats
I have mummy truths to tell Whereat the living mock, Though not for sober ear, For maybe all that hear Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.
William Butler Yeats
O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.
William Butler Yeats
I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me
William Butler Yeats
Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?
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I would have touched it like a child But knew my finger could but have touched Cold stone and water. I grew wild, Even accusing heaven because It had set down among its laws: Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch.
William Butler Yeats
I long for truth, and yet I cannot stay from that My better self disowns, For a man's attention Brings such satisfaction To the craving in my bones.
William Butler Yeats
Eyes spiritualised by death can judge, I cannot, but I am not content.
William Butler Yeats
If Michael, leader of God's host When Heaven and Hell are met, Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post He would his deeds forget.
William Butler Yeats
I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.
William Butler Yeats
We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936
William Butler Yeats
And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all
William Butler Yeats
The hare grows old as she plays in the sun And gazes around her with eyes of brightness Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done She limps along in an aged whiteness.
William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats
Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.
William Butler Yeats
