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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

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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
Solitude
Friend
Half
Found
Night
Nothing
Long
Planned
Good
Wit

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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.
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A line will take us hours maybe / Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught... Better go down upon your marrow-bones / And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones... For to articulate sweet sounds together / Is to work harder than all these, and yet / Be thought an idler by the noisy set.
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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.
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And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.
William Butler Yeats
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For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon.
William Butler Yeats
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May we two stand, When we are dead, beyond the setting suns, A little from other shades apart, With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.
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While they danced they came over them the weariness with the world, the melancholy, the pity one for the other, which is the exultation of love.
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The Muse is mute when public men Applaud a modern throne.
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For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
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How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ?
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It's certain there are trout somewhere - And maybe I shall take a trout - but I do not seem to care.
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Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats
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Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.
William Butler Yeats
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on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.
William Butler Yeats
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I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.
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The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. . . . I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance - the revolt of the soul against the intellect.
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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
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The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
William Butler Yeats
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What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There's better exercise In the sunlight and wind.
William Butler Yeats