Quote#Friendship
The friends that have it I do wrong
Quote byWilliam Butler Yeats · 1865–1939
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, II, preliminary poem (1908).
English (original)
The friends that have it I do wrong Whenever I remake a song Should know what issue is at stake, It is myself that I remake.
— William Butler Yeats
More from William Butler Yeats
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 …
I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all — the colleges I mean — like an opera.
I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal, — that is they have ceased to be self-centered, have given up their individuality.... The shallowest …
This melancholy London. I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
You are still wrecked among heathen dreams.