William Butler Yeats Quotes

There are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.

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Nor bird nor beast Could make me wish for anything this day, Being old, but that the old alone might die, And that would be against God's Providence.

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O heart, we are old; The living beauty is for younger men: We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

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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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I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.

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Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

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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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And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew.

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I whispered, 'I am too young,' and then, 'I am old enough'; wherefore I threw a penny to find out if I might love.

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An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

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I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away... and the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even spoken to them.

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for never yet Has lover lived, but longed to wive Like them that are no more alive.

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What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

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He Who is wrapped in purple robes, With planets in His care, Had pity on the least of things Asleep upon a chair.

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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.

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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?

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But bear in mind your lover's wage Is what your looking-glass can show, And that he will turn green with rage At all that is not pictured there.

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We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.

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Education is not about filling a pail, it's about lighting a fire.

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The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away.

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