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And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
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
Goads
Oxen
Behinds
Behind
Time
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
I agree about Shaw - he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.
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
Come let us mock at the great That had such burdens on the mind And toiled so hard and late To leave some monument behind, Nor thought of the leveling wind.
William Butler Yeats
It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.
William Butler Yeats
The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
William Butler Yeats
I pray-for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.
William Butler Yeats
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
William Butler Yeats
How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there's a politician That has read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!
William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.
William Butler Yeats
All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man's or woman's body.
William Butler Yeats
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
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
William Butler Yeats
Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
William Butler Yeats
The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
William Butler Yeats
The hare grows old as she plays in the sun And gazes around her with eyes of brightness Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done She limps along in an aged whiteness.
William Butler Yeats
I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.
William Butler Yeats
Talent perceives differences genius, unity.
William Butler Yeats
The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
William Butler Yeats
I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
William Butler Yeats
