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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.
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
Living
Spend
Action
Paper
Thought
Unless
Repair
May
Design
Asleep
Book
Dead
Weary
Nothing
Wisdom
Waste
Books
Conversation
Reading
Pride
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
I thought no more was needed Youth to prolong Than dumb-bell and foil To keep the body young. O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?
William Butler Yeats
We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.
William Butler Yeats
Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.
William Butler Yeats
How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
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
The Bishop has a skin, God knows, Wrinkled like the foot of a goose, (All find safety in the tomb.) Nor can he hide in holy black The heron's hunch upon his back, But a birch-tree stood my Jack.
William Butler Yeats
A speckled cat and a tame hare Eat at my hearthstone And sleep there And both look up to me alone For learning and defence As I look up to Providence.
William Butler Yeats
It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.
William Butler Yeats
All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.
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
even The bed of love, that in the imagination Had seemed to be the giver of all peace, Is no more than a wine-cup in the tasting, And as soon finished.
William Butler Yeats
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
William Butler Yeats
Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
William Butler Yeats
Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.
William Butler Yeats
It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat.
William Butler Yeats
A lonely impulse of delight
William Butler Yeats
Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.
William Butler Yeats
I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.
William Butler Yeats