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Now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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
Born
Twenties
Cradle
Come
Towards
Centuries
Hour
Nightmare
Century
Beast
Sleep
Rough
Vexed
Hours
Round
Stony
Lasts
Rounds
Bethlehem
Last
Twenty
Rocking
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
I Sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again.
William Butler Yeats
Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
William Butler Yeats
I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes.
William Butler Yeats
Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.
William Butler Yeats
The old priest Peter Gilligan Was weary night and day For half his flock were in their beds, Or under green sods lay.
William Butler Yeats
Things fall apart the center cannot hold.
William Butler Yeats
Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.
William Butler Yeats
One man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
William Butler Yeats
And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind, Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind: I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
William Butler Yeats
What do we know but that we face one another in this place?
William Butler Yeats
Though leaves are many, the root is one.
William Butler Yeats
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
William Butler Yeats
Consume my heart away, sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is, and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.
William Butler Yeats
Ah, let us kiss each other's eyes,/And laugh our love away.
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
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave on the sea.
William Butler Yeats
Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told your character: Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.
William Butler Yeats
The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
William Butler Yeats
He Who is wrapped in purple robes, With planets in His care, Had pity on the least of things Asleep upon a chair.
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
