William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by
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The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.
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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.
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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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Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.
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As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead, For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said. Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind.
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That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There's many a one shall find out all heartache On finding that her voice is sweet and low Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know- Although they do not talk of it at school - That we must labor to be beautiful.
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to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief.
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What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
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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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And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.
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I bear a burden that might well try Men that do all by rule, And what can I That am a wandering-witted fool But pray to God that He ease My great responsibilities?
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There where the course is, Delight makes all of the one mind, The riders upon the galloping horses, The crowd that closes in behind.
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Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.
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But stories that live longest Are sung above the glass, And Parnell loved his country And Parnell loved his lass.
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Farewell - farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.
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Myself I must remake.
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The women take so little stock In what I do or say They'd sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray.
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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.
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rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.
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His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
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I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes But when this soul, its body off Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows.
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We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love
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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.