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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
Care
Flower
Take
Loss
Great
Dreams
Lightness
Something
Perhaps
Retirement
Life
Loses
Aging
Grows
Begins
Hands
Fruit
Dream
Older
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.
William Butler Yeats
Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.
William Butler Yeats
Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
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
The Muse is mute when public men Applaud a modern throne.
William Butler Yeats
I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams.
William Butler Yeats
May we two stand, When we are dead, beyond the setting suns, A little from other shades apart, With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.
William Butler Yeats
Things said or done long years ago Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.
William Butler Yeats
I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.
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
Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
Time can but make her beauty over again.
William Butler Yeats
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
We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936
William Butler Yeats
Between extremities Man runs his course A brand, or flaming breath, Comes to destroy All those antinomies Of day and night.
William Butler Yeats