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What do we know but that we face one another in this place?
William Butler Yeats -
. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death
William Butler Yeats
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I had a chair at every hearth, When no one turned to see, With 'Look at that old fellow there, 'And who may he be?
William Butler Yeats -
Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.
William Butler Yeats -
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.
William Butler Yeats -
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.
William Butler Yeats -
To sit beside the board and drink good wine And watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire And feel content and wisdom in your heart, This is the best of life; when we are young We long to tread a way none trod before, But find the excellent old way through love And through the care of children to the hour Forbidding Fate and Time and Change goodbye.
William Butler Yeats -
My wretched dragon is perplexed.
William Butler Yeats
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Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
William Butler Yeats -
All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.
William Butler Yeats -
Though pedantry denies, It's plain the Bible means That Solomon grew wise While talking with his queens.
William Butler Yeats -
Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul
William Butler Yeats -
Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.
William Butler Yeats -
We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love
William Butler Yeats
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In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.
William Butler Yeats -
Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.
William Butler Yeats -
... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.
William Butler Yeats -
Everything in nature is resurrection.
William Butler Yeats -
And learn that the best thing is To change my loves while dancing And pay but a kiss for a kiss.
William Butler Yeats -
I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch.
William Butler Yeats
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I have no question: It is enough, I know what fixed the station Of star and cloud. And knowing all, I cry. . . .
William Butler Yeats -
I have nothing but the embittered sun; Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun.
William Butler Yeats -
Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
William Butler Yeats -
Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.
William Butler Yeats