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Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
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
Idea
Reborn
Seems
Sits
Ideas
Intended
Even
Accident
Something
Breakfast
Never
Accidents
Incoherence
Complete
Bundle
Poet
Bundles
More quotes by 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
In dreams begin responsibilitiy.
William Butler Yeats
I would that I were an old beggar Rolling a blind pearl eye, For he cannot see my lady Go gallivanting by.
William Butler Yeats
A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought.
William Butler Yeats
A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.
William Butler Yeats
There are a few of the open-air spirits the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.
William Butler Yeats
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
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
To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.
William Butler Yeats
Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. I thirst for accusation. All that was sung. All that was said in Ireland is a lie Breed out of the contagion of the throng, Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.
William Butler Yeats
But I, being poor, have only my dreams I have spread my dreams under your feet Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William Butler Yeats
Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?
William Butler Yeats
You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.
William Butler Yeats
And learn that the best thing is To change my loves while dancing And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
William Butler Yeats
I know of the leafy paths that the witches take Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool, And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake.
William Butler Yeats
Though leaves are many, the root is one.
William Butler Yeats
Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
William Butler Yeats
Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.
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
When we are high and airy hundreds say That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place, While those same hundreds mock another day Because we have made our art of common things.
William Butler Yeats
