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Because this age and the next age Engender in the ditch, No man can know a happy man From any passing wretch, If Folly link with Elegance No man knows which is which.
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
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Men
Passings
Folly
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Engender
Mankind
Wretch
Age
Ditch
Happiness
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Elegance
More quotes by William Butler Yeats
My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.
William Butler Yeats
Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
William Butler Yeats
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
William Butler Yeats
Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.
William Butler Yeats
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains As though to choose whatever shape it wills.
William Butler Yeats
The Bishop has a skin, God knows, Wrinkled like the foot of a goose, (All find safety in the tomb.) Nor can he hide in holy black The heron's hunch upon his back, But a birch-tree stood my Jack.
William Butler Yeats
Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.
William Butler Yeats
When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.
William Butler Yeats
An age is the reversal of an age: When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone, We lived like men that watch a painted stage. What matter for the scene, the scene once gone: It had not touched our lives.
William Butler Yeats
Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.
William Butler Yeats
I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.
William Butler Yeats
I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
William Butler Yeats
A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.
William Butler Yeats
...How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face... When You Are Old And Gray
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
Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child's laughter, a woman's kiss.
William Butler Yeats
Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.
William Butler Yeats
Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.
William Butler Yeats
The old priest Peter Gilligan Was weary night and day For half his flock were in their beds, Or under green sods lay.
William Butler Yeats
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
