Quote

When a man grows old his joy Grows more deep day after day, His empty heart is full at length But he has need of all that strength Because of the increasing Night That opens her mystery and fright.

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
Fear
Aging
Night
Empty
Need
Mystery
Needs
Deep
Heart
Strength
Fright
Men
Joy
Increasing
Full
Opens
Grows
Length

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances, Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And is anxious in its sleep. . . .
William Butler Yeats
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Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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I knew that I had seen, had seen at last That girl my unremembering nights hold fast Or else my dreams that fly If I should rub an eye, And yet in flying fling into my meat A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat.
William Butler Yeats
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The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
William Butler Yeats
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I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
William Butler Yeats
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It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
William Butler Yeats
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Maybe the bride-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there...
William Butler Yeats
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I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay
William Butler Yeats
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Through winter-time we call on spring, And through the spring on summer call, And when the abounding hedges ring Declare that winter's best of all: And after that there's nothing good Because the spring time has not come- Not know that what disturbs our blood Is but its longing for the tomb.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd. This Land of Saints, and then as the applause died out, Of plaster Saints his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.
William Butler Yeats
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Laughter not time destroyed my voice And put that crack in it, And when the moon's pot-bellied I get a laughing fit.
William Butler Yeats
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Time can but make it easier to be wise / Though now it seems impossible, and so / All that you need is patience.
William Butler Yeats
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If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.
William Butler Yeats
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Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it.
William Butler Yeats
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Wine enters through the mouth, Love, the eyes. I raise the glass to my mouth, I look at you, I sigh.
William Butler Yeats
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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