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The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told; I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart.
William Butler Yeats -
How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
William Butler Yeats
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The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.
William Butler Yeats -
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
William Butler Yeats -
What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?
William Butler Yeats -
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.
William Butler Yeats -
And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.
William Butler Yeats -
What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.
William Butler Yeats
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My chair was nearest to the fire In every company That talked of love or politics, Ere Time transfigured me.
William Butler Yeats -
Hammer your thoughts into unity.
William Butler Yeats -
Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.
William Butler Yeats -
Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
William Butler Yeats -
I sat on cushioned otter-skin: My word was law from Ith to Emain, And shook at Invar Amargin The hearts of the world-troubling seamen, And drove tumult and war away.
William Butler Yeats -
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.
William Butler Yeats
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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.
William Butler Yeats -
The women take so little stock In what I do or say They'd sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray.
William Butler Yeats -
Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
William Butler Yeats -
Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.
William Butler Yeats -
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will.
William Butler Yeats -
Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye. What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher, Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.
William Butler Yeats
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I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood; And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes.
William Butler Yeats -
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.
William Butler Yeats -
I would have touched it like a child But knew my finger could but have touched Cold stone and water. I grew wild, Even accusing heaven because It had set down among its laws: Nothing that we love over-much Is ponderable to our touch.
William Butler Yeats -
The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
William Butler Yeats