{"author":"W.B. Yeats","author_id":"W.B.+Yeats","total_quotes":82,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"W.B. Yeats","tags":["ageing","aging","beauty","love","poetry"],"id":1660,"author_id":"W.B.+Yeats"},{"text":"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.","author":"W.B. Yeats","tags":["irish","irish-writer","joy","tragedy","william-butler-yeats"],"id":7393,"author_id":"W.B.+Yeats"},{"text":"O bid me mount and sail up thereAmid the cloudy wrack,For Peg and Meg and Paris' loveThat had so straight a back,Are gone away, and some that stayHave changed their silk for sack.","author":"W.B. Yeats","tags":["paris"],"id":10973,"author_id":"W.B.+Yeats"},{"text":"The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow.","author":"W.B. Yeats","tags":["books","christianity","dante","death","god","gods","milton","pagan","paganism","shakespeare"],"id":16551,"author_id":"W.B.+Yeats"},{"text":"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.","author":"W.B. Yeats","tags":["education","lifelong-learning"],"id":18658,"author_id":"W.B.+Yeats"},{"text":"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.","author":"W.B. Yeats","tags":["spirituality","stars","weariness"],"id":23223,"author_id":"W.B.+Yeats"},{"text":"Ld heads forgetful of their sins,Old, learned, respectable bald headsEdit and annotate the linesThat young men, tossing on their beds,Rhymed out in love’s despairTo flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;Wear out the carpet with their shoesEarning respect; have no strange friend;If they have sinned nobody knows.Lord, what would they sayShould their Catullus walk that way?","author":"W.B. Yeats","tags":["age","annotation","creative-process","criticism","critics","erudition","frustration","inferiority","love-poetry","perfection","poetry","scholars","writing"],"id":24388,"author_id":"W.B.+Yeats"},{"text":"Before me floats an image, man or shade,Shade more than man, more image than a shade;For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-clothMay unwind the winding path;A mouth that has no moisture and no breathBreathless mouths may summon;('Byzantium').","author":"W.B. Yeats","tags":["death","ghost","hades","shade"],"id":26712,"author_id":"W.B.+Yeats"},{"text":"In dreams begin responsibilities.","author":"W.B. Yeats","tags":["dreams","responsibility"],"id":30311,"author_id":"W.B.+Yeats"},{"text":"I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.","author":"W.B. Yeats","tags":["books","poetry","solitude"],"id":32342,"author_id":"W.B.+Yeats"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":82,"pages":9,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}