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What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.

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
Knowledge
True
Time
Love
Shown
Gone
Known

More quotes by 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.
William Butler Yeats
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Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
William Butler Yeats
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A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.
William Butler Yeats
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What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms?
William Butler Yeats
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I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
William Butler Yeats
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That toil of growing up The ignominy of boyhood the distress Of boyhood changing into man The unfinished man and his pain.
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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The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.
William Butler Yeats
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A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.
William Butler Yeats
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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
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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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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
William Butler Yeats
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Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.
William Butler Yeats
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For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.
William Butler Yeats
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I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.
William Butler Yeats
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Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
William Butler Yeats
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Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
William Butler Yeats
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From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.
William Butler Yeats
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If Michael, leader of God's host When Heaven and Hell are met, Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post He would his deeds forget.
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