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I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.

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
Somewhere
Byzantium
Bird
Palace
Gold
Palaces
Tree
Emperor
Read
Sang
Made
Artificial
Birds
Silver

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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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
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Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.
William Butler Yeats
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Locke sank into a swoon The Garden died God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.
William Butler Yeats
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And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.
William Butler Yeats
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I would that there was nothing in the world But my beloved that night and day had perished, And all that is and all that is to be, All that is not the meeting of our lips.
William Butler Yeats
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Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.
William Butler Yeats
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Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing. My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.
William Butler Yeats
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But Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement. For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.
William Butler Yeats
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How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.
William Butler Yeats
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Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
William Butler Yeats
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Choose your companions from the best Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
William Butler Yeats
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Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
William Butler Yeats
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We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.
William Butler Yeats
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You ask what I have found and far and wide I go, Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew, The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay, And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen where are they?
William Butler Yeats
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Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
William Butler Yeats
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And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.
William Butler Yeats