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All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it

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
Beyond
Fable
Little
Fables
Without
Seen
Simpler
Many
Rich
Wandering
Great
Half
Wander
Always
Art
Limited
Life
Cannot
Masters
World
Littles
Understood
Imaged
Better

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I Sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again.
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All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.
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Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while.
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Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.
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What can I but enumerate old themes?
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I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay
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Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.
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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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The problem wiv some blokes is that wen they ain't drunk, they're sober.
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Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action, for we would not change that which we love.
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The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.
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I have found nothing half so good / As my long-planned half solitude, / Where I can sit up half the night / With some friend that has the wit.
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We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.
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... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.
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I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.
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It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.
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Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
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Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
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