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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

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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
Life
Loses
Aging
Grows
Begins
Hands
Fruit
Dream
Older
Care
Flower
Take
Loss
Great
Dreams
Lightness
Something
Perhaps
Retirement

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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All men live in suffering I know as few can know, Whether they take the upper road Or stay content on the low.
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I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
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Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. I thirst for accusation. All that was sung. All that was said in Ireland is a lie Breed out of the contagion of the throng, Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.
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Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
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God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.
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rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.
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An age is the reversal of an age: When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone, We lived like men that watch a painted stage. What matter for the scene, the scene once gone: It had not touched our lives.
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O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.
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Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.
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An intellectual hate is the worst.
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Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
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We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity.
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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.
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Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.
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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.
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The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.
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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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In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.
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He Who is wrapped in purple robes, With planets in His care, Had pity on the least of things Asleep upon a chair.
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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.
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