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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
Eye
Quickly
Away
Ancient
Writers
Best
Looked
Goodnight
Never
Lived
Drawn
Life
Second
Breath
Turn
Breaths
Turns
Gay
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?
William Butler Yeats
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
William Butler Yeats
If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.
William Butler Yeats
Come let us mock at the good That fancied goodness might be gay, And sick of solitude Might proclaim a holiday: Wind shrieked and where are they?
William Butler Yeats
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave on the sea.
William Butler Yeats
Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.
William Butler Yeats
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
William Butler Yeats
Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.
William Butler Yeats
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
William Butler Yeats
An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?
William Butler Yeats
Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.
William Butler Yeats
Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
William Butler Yeats
From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.
William Butler Yeats
Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.
William Butler Yeats
An intellectual hate is the worst.
William Butler Yeats
What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons Do, but awake a hope to live...?
William Butler Yeats
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
William Butler Yeats
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
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
Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.
William Butler Yeats
