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Though logic-choppers rule the town, And every man and maid and boy Has marked a distant object down, An aimless joy is a pure joy.

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
Objects
Marked
Pure
Distant
Boys
Optimism
Joy
Town
Though
Towns
Choppers
Every
Logic
Aimless
Men
Object
Maid
Rule
Maids

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.
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The winds that awakened the stars Are blowing through my blood.
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While on that old grey stone I sat Under the old wind-broken tree, I knew that One is animate, Mankind inanimate phantasy.
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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.
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Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
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Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
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We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity.
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O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
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Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns? I have been changed to a hound with one red ear I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns.
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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.
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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.
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The hare grows old as she plays in the sun And gazes around her with eyes of brightness Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done She limps along in an aged whiteness.
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The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. . . . I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance - the revolt of the soul against the intellect.
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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.
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. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death
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All things fall and are built again, And those that build them again are gay.
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For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
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Poetry and music I have banished, But the stupidity Of root, shoot, blossom or clay Makes no demand. I bend my body to the spade Or grope with a dirty hand.
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And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.
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Locke sank into a swoon The Garden died God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side.
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