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And if joy were not on the earth, There were an end of change and birth, And Earth and Heaven and Hell would die, And in some gloomy barrow lie Folded like a frozen fly.

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
Earth
Birth
Would
Joy
Life
Hell
Like
Dies
Heaven
Barrow
Lying
Folded
Ends
Gloomy
Change
Frozen

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.
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And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place.
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Life is a journey up a spiral staircase as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive we go both round and upward.
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The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
William Butler Yeats
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What man does not understand, he fears and what he fears, he tends to destroy.
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Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.
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Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.
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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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I long for truth, and yet I cannot stay from that My better self disowns, For a man's attention Brings such satisfaction To the craving in my bones.
William Butler Yeats
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Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain- beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering.
William Butler Yeats
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O sweet everlasting Voices, be still Go to the guards of the heavenly fold And bid them wander obeying your will, Flame under flame, till Time be no more.
William Butler Yeats
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All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake.
William Butler Yeats
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My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.
William Butler Yeats
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Florence Farr once said to me, If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, 'this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know,' we could die upon the instant and be united with God.
William Butler Yeats
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And learn that the best thing is To change my loves while dancing And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
William Butler Yeats
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You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age They were not such a plague when I was young What else have I to spur me into song?
William Butler Yeats
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... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.
William Butler Yeats
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Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.
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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Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
William Butler Yeats