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The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
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
Always
Lights
Motive
Deeds
Shadow
Alone
Inspirational
Light
Deed
Looks
Shadows
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough And pressed at midnighht in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
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.
William Butler Yeats
The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who live with it.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
THOUGH you are in your shining days, Voices among the crowd And new friends busy with your praise, Be not unkind or proud, But think about old friends the most: Time's bitter flood will rise, Your beauty perish and be lost For all eyes but these eyes.
William Butler Yeats
No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.
William Butler Yeats
In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
William Butler Yeats
A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him up for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.
William Butler Yeats
What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms?
William Butler Yeats
The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
William Butler Yeats
A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade, Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out. It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
William Butler Yeats
For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,”Here is the fiddler of Dooney!” / And dance like a wave of the sea.
William Butler Yeats
The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it.
William Butler Yeats
The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.
William Butler Yeats
Because the priest must have like every dog his day Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon, We and our dolls being but the world were best away.
William Butler Yeats
Things thought too long can be no longer thought, For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
William Butler Yeats
I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
William Butler Yeats
The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.
William Butler Yeats
