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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
Hour
Nightmare
Century
Beast
Sleep
Rough
Vexed
Hours
Round
Stony
Lasts
Rounds
Bethlehem
Last
Twenty
Rocking
Born
Twenties
Cradle
Come
Towards
Centuries
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
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
Though pedantry denies, It's plain the Bible means That Solomon grew wise While talking with his queens.
William Butler Yeats
The Muse is mute when public men Applaud a modern throne.
William Butler Yeats
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.
William Butler Yeats
All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
William Butler Yeats
For wisdom is the property of the dead, A something incompatible with life and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood, A property of the living but no stain Can come upon the visage of the moon When it has looked in glory from a cloud.
William Butler Yeats
A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
William Butler Yeats
And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.
William Butler Yeats
I broke my heart in two So hard I struck. What matter? for I know That out of rock, Out of a desolate source, Love leaps upon its course.
William Butler Yeats
Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.
William Butler Yeats
It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike.
William Butler Yeats
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves Had blotted out man's image and his cry.
William Butler Yeats
Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk
William Butler Yeats
Man's life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality.
William Butler Yeats
One should say before sleeping: I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knee and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.
William Butler Yeats
The living can assist the imagination of the dead.
William Butler Yeats
When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.
William Butler Yeats
How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
William Butler Yeats
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
William Butler Yeats
Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind, That loved his learning better than mankind, Though courteous to the worst much falling he Brooded upon sanctity.
William Butler Yeats
