"Supernatural Songs, VIII, Whence Had They Come?"

William Butler Yeats Literature See all quotes by William Butler Yeats →

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“Do what you will. I do not understand stops. I write my work so completely for the ear that I feel helpless when I have to measure pauses by stops & commas.”

“The friends that have it I do wrongWhenever I remake a songShould know what issue is at stake,It is myself that I remake.”

“The years like great black oxen tread the world,And God the herdsman goads them on behind,And I am broken by their passing feet.”

“You are still wrecked among heathen dreams.”

“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.”

“Alphabetical Listing of Poems by Yeats”

Resonant Thoughts

"This mysterious end, so in keeping with Cagliostro's mysterious origin and personality, appeals to the imagination. Nothing excites curiosity like a mystery. Since his death there have been as many at…"

— Alessandro Cagliostro

Medicine1743–1795

#nature

"You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standin…"

— Arthur Machen

Literature1863–1947

#nature

"Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle..."

— Emil Cioran

Philosophy1911–1995

#nature

"It would be as natural for a full-grown tiger to mew as for a man released from the slavery of imitations ever to go back to his neighbor again with: “What do you think of this? What do you advise abo…"

— Henry S. Haskins

Literature1875–1957

#nature