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William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats Quotes

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Famous William Butler Yeats Quotes

“All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.”

IfsWorldMindSoulSidesMemoriesOpinionRichHabitBuiltEmptyInstinctExtremesInstanceSooner Or LaterProbabilityPropositionsStrainAffrontEmpty Souls
Book:Autobiographies: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats
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“When You Are Old" WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

MenLooksLittlesBookSoulMomentsDreamEyeFacesStarsSleepFireGraceSorrowMountainShadowCrowdsGladBarsOne ManGreyGlowingPilgrimOverheadBendingNoddingBending Down
Author:William Butler Yeats
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“THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea”

MadeSoulMatterBeautifulFallGirlFoundLostSoundCommonSeaBrokenNo Matter WhatLaysDancingWoundsDisasterHungryTriumphKneesDesperateDivisionHidingClimbingShoreIrelandCapsLoftyBasketsThat GirlImprovisingCargo
Book:Poems of William Butler Yeats
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“As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.”

MenLittlesSoulDreamBodyLightAgeSpiritualPerfectDarknessSkyDivineGrewBirthLettersGoldHeavyUpliftingFancyLabourMortalityEcstasyDreamerCriedCurtainsFillingAlchemistWearinessFurnacesPoints Of LightSpiritual Beauty
Book:The Yeats companion
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“Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

KnowsSoulWisdomBodyBornPleasureTreeDespairLaborDancingOilDancerRootedLeafsGlancesMidnightBruisedBlossomingChestnuts
Author:William Butler Yeats
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“We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.”

PeopleMindMadeSoulSelfMovingCitiesDoubtOur LivesInfluenceSensitivePassiveLikelihoodBarbaric
Book:The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays
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