William Butler Yeats Quotes
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The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who live with it.
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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
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Many ingenious lovely things are gone / That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.
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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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Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.
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I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head.
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Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing. My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.
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For the good are always the merry, / Save by an evil chance,/ And the merry love the fiddle,/ And the merry love to dance: / And when the folk there spy me,/ They will all come up to me, / With,”Here is the fiddler of Dooney!” / And dance like a wave of the sea.
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Why should I seek for love or study it? It is of God and passes human wit; I study hatred with great diligence, For that's a passion in my own control, A sort of besom that can clear the soul Of everything that is not mind or sense.
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For what but eye and ear silence the mind With the minute particulars of mankind?
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somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
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"Chaunt in his ear delusions magical, That he may fight the horses of the sea." The Druids took them to their mystery, And chaunted for three days.
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How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there's a politician That has read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!
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Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.
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The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
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It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things; or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.
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Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
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The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
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If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf
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On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand lifted up that blest; And right between these two a girl at play That, it may be, had danced her life away.
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That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There's many a one shall find out all heartache On finding that her voice is sweet and low Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know- Although they do not talk of it at school - That we must labor to be beautiful.
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We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.
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Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.
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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 have nothing more to give you than my heart. Spanish saying Hearts are not to be had as a gift hearts are to be earned.
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The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there Stood in the circuit of a needle's eye.
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And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.
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My soul had found All happiness in its own cause or ground. Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot Godhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot Those amorous cries that out of quiet come And must the common round of day resume.
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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.
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Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant.
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