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What can I but enumerate old themes?
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
Theme
Enumerate
Themes
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
Choose your companions from the best Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.
William Butler Yeats
The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain, The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord, Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred, Troy backed its Helen, Troy died and adored Great nations blossom above, A slave bows down to a slave.
William Butler Yeats
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.
William Butler Yeats
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.
William Butler Yeats
I have no question: It is enough, I know what fixed the station Of star and cloud. And knowing all, I cry. . . .
William Butler Yeats
Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action, for we would not change that which we love.
William Butler Yeats
O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman's gaze.
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
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
William Butler Yeats
We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936
William Butler Yeats
I, too, await The hour of thy great wind of love and hate. When shall the stars be blown about the sky, Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?
William Butler Yeats
Only the dead can be forgiven But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
William Butler Yeats
I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs, Those undreamt accidents that have made me Seeing that Fame has perished this long while, Being but a part of ancient ceremony Notorious, till all my priceless things Are but a post the passing dogs defile.
William Butler Yeats
The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there Stood in the circuit of a needle's eye.
William Butler Yeats
Come let us mock at the good That fancied goodness might be gay, And sick of solitude Might proclaim a holiday: Wind shrieked and where are they?
William Butler Yeats
Being young you have not known The fool's triumph, nor yet Love lost as soon as won, Nor the best labourer dead And all the sheaves to bind.
William Butler Yeats
A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought.
William Butler Yeats
Time can but make her beauty over again.
William Butler Yeats
What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
William Butler Yeats
Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade.
William Butler Yeats
