"Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike."
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Quote collection
William Butler Yeats quotes (page 11 of 30)
591 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned."
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"Although our love is waning, let us stand by the lone border of the lake once more, together in that hour of gentleness. When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep."
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"Man's life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality."
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"... What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me?"
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"BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there."
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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?"
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"In dreams begin responsibilitiy."
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"We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty."
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"I am haunted by numberless islands, many a Danaan shore, Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!"
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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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"Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair."
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"It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure."
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"I Sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again."
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"Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought."
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"There is no deformity But saves us from a dream."
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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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"Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart."
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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 hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core."
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