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Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
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
Turn
Breaths
Turns
Gay
Eye
Quickly
Away
Ancient
Best
Writers
Never
Looked
Goodnight
Life
Lived
Drawn
Second
Breath
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
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.
William Butler Yeats
A man in his own secret meditation / Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / In art or politics.
William Butler Yeats
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still Go to the guards of the heavenly fold And bid them wander obeying your will, Flame under flame, till Time be no more.
William Butler Yeats
In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.
William Butler Yeats
The labor of the alchemists, who were called artist in their day, is a befitting comparison for a deliberate change of style.
William Butler Yeats
Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power.
William Butler Yeats
From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.
William Butler Yeats
On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand lifted up that blest And right between these two a girl at play That, it may be, had danced her life away.
William Butler Yeats
There is only one romance the Soul's.
William Butler Yeats
The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.
William Butler Yeats
Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.
William Butler Yeats
Though I have many words, What woman's satisfied, I am no longer faint Because at her side? O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?
William Butler Yeats
What can be explained is not poetry.
William Butler Yeats
It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.
William Butler Yeats
The poor have very few hours in which to enjoy themselves they must take their pleasure raw they haven't the time to cook it.
William Butler Yeats
Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.
William Butler Yeats
I say that Roger Casement Did what he had to do, He died upon the gallows But that is nothing new.
William Butler Yeats
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew.
William Butler Yeats
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
William Butler Yeats
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom young We loved each other and were ignorant.
William Butler Yeats
