William Butler Yeats Quotes

All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

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I thought it out this very day, Noon upon the clock, A man may put pretence away Who leans upon a stick, May sing, and sing until he drop, Whether to maid or hag.

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Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

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Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

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Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

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A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.

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When two close kindred meet What better than call a dance?.

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From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.

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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.

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Great Powers of falling wave and wind and windy fire, With your harmonious choir Encircle her I love and sing her into peace, That my old care may cease.

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There is no release In a bodkin or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's dirty slate.

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Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

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

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O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.

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My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.

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Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

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Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

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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.

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I know of the leafy paths that the witches take Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool, And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake.

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Give to these children, new from the world, Rest far from men. Is anything better, anything better? Tell us it then.

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