William Butler Yeats Quotes
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When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.
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Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
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The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it.
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A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade, Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out. It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
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Because the priest must have like every dog his day Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon, We and our dolls being but the world were best away.
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What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons Do, but awake a hope to live...?
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Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.
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I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fadeand flee; And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky, Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.
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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.
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All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.
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Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.
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I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made.
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And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
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It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline.
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A tree there is that from its topmost bough Is half all glittering flame and half all green Abounding foliage moistened with the dew; And half is half and yet is all the scene; And half and half consume what they renew.
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Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
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Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.
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I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more.
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What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
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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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It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is
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I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.
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now I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
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Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end.