"Only the dead can be forgiven; But..." - Quote by William Butler Yeats
Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
More by William Butler Yeats
“It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things; or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.”
“For men were born to pray and save:Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,It's with O'Leary in the grave.”
“All things fall and are built again,And those that build them again are gay.”
More on Forgiveness
“Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names. It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.”
“To withhold forgiveness is to take poison and expect the unforgiven to die.”
“Return animosity with virtue.”
More on Death
“For when is death not within our selves? And as Heracleitus says: “Living and dead are the same, and so are awake and asleep, young and old. The former when shifted are the latter, and again the latter when shifted are the former."”
“If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?”
“We could say that the totality, life wants the sapling to become a tree, but the sapling doesn't see itself as separate from life and so wants nothing for itself. It is one with what life wants. That's why it isn't worried or stressed. And, if it has to die prematurely, it dies with ease.”