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I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me

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
Time
Transfigured
Spit
Face
Faces

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul
William Butler Yeats
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Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.
William Butler Yeats
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I would that there was nothing in the world But my beloved that night and day had perished, And all that is and all that is to be, All that is not the meeting of our lips.
William Butler Yeats
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I know of the leafy paths that the witches take Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool, And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake.
William Butler Yeats
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A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more?
William Butler Yeats
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True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
William Butler Yeats
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My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.
William Butler Yeats
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Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.
William Butler Yeats
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Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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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
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I have nothing but the embittered sun Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun.
William Butler Yeats
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I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
William Butler Yeats
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Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child's laughter, a woman's kiss.
William Butler Yeats
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And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
William Butler Yeats
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Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it.
William Butler Yeats
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Speech after long silence it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead . . . That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom young We loved each other and were ignorant.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good.
William Butler Yeats
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Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye. What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher, Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.
William Butler Yeats