Long Quotes by William Butler Yeats

22 Long quotes by William Butler Yeats

All Long quotes William Butler Yeats’s page

Yeats’s poetic vision often stretches across time, and his thoughts on length echo that expansive view. In twenty‑two brief passages you’ll encounter his blend of mythic resonance and personal insight.

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Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.

William Butler Yeats

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Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?

William Butler Yeats

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Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.

William Butler Yeats

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Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

William Butler Yeats

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“Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. Oh, when may it suffice?”

William Butler Yeats

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Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?

William Butler Yeats

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I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.

William Butler Yeats

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I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow; And then I…

William Butler Yeats

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So long as all is ordered for attack, and that alone, leaders will instinctively increase the number of enemies that they may…

William Butler Yeats

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Things said or done long years ago Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or…

William Butler Yeats

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Things thought too long can be no longer thought, For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, And ancient lineaments are blotted…

William Butler Yeats

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Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead . . . That we descant and yet…

William Butler Yeats

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I have found nothing half so good / As my long-planned half solitude, / Where I can sit up half the night…

William Butler Yeats

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I long for truth, and yet I cannot stay from that My better self disowns, For a man's attention Brings such satisfaction…

William Butler Yeats

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The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It is put up with as long as possible. It brings good…

William Butler Yeats

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That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees - Those dying generations-at their…

William Butler Yeats

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To sit beside the board and drink good wine And watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire And feel content and…

William Butler Yeats

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And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in…

William Butler Yeats

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Many times man lives and dies between his two eternities: that of race and that of Soul... A brief parting from those…

William Butler Yeats

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I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs, Those undreamt accidents that have made me Seeing that Fame has perished this long…

William Butler Yeats

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Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss…

William Butler Yeats

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...Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World! You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled Upon the wharves…

William Butler Yeats

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More by William Butler Yeats

Time can but make her beauty over again.

William Butler Yeats

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I would have touched it like a child But knew my finger could but have touched Cold stone and water. I grew wild, Even…

William Butler Yeats

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You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no…

William Butler Yeats

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Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast, Drowning love's lonely hour…

William Butler Yeats

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That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.

William Butler Yeats

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I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.

William Butler Yeats

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Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

William Butler Yeats

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We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.

William Butler Yeats

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I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I…

William Butler Yeats

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Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the…

William Butler Yeats

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Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving…

William Butler Yeats

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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.

William Butler Yeats

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We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women…

William Butler Yeats

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Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action,…

William Butler Yeats

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Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide,…

William Butler Yeats

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