No. XV
Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)
“That is no country for old men.”
—
W.B. Yeats
,
book
The Tower
St. 1
Cf. Nelson Algren's later, "That was no town for the aged or the aging."
The Tower (1928), Sailing to Byzantium http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1575/
Context: That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "That is no country for old men." by W.B. Yeats?
W.B. Yeats 255
Irish poet and playwright 1865–1939Related quotes
“Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.”
Act V, scene i.
All Fools (1605)
“People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.”
Ogden Nash
(1902–1971) American poet
"Old Men"
Many Long Years Ago (1945)
Context: People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.
“Young men, hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young.”
Augustus
(-63–14 BC) founder of Julio-Claudian dynasty and first emperor of the Roman Empire
“Young men," said Cæsar, "hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young.”
Plutarch
(46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher
Cæsar Augustus
Roman Apophthegms
“[ Old men go to death; death comes to young men. ]”
George Herbert
(1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest
Jacula Prudentum (1651)
“Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.”
Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
Adlai Stevenson
(1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN
Comparing Richard Nixon to Alben Barkley during the 1952 presidential race, as quoted in Richard Nixon: A Political and Personal Portrait (1959) by Earl Mazo, Chapter 7
“For in misery men grow old quickly.”
Hesiod
book
Works and Days
Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 93.
“It is an old remark, that as men are, such they paint their gods”
Fragments of Markham's notes
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: It is an old remark, that as men are, such they paint their gods; and as in themselves the passionate, or demonic nature, long preponderated, so the gods they worshipped were demons like themselves, jealous, capricious, exacting, revengeful, the figures which fill the old mythologies, and appear partly in the Old Testament. They feared them as they feared the powerful of their own race, and sought to propitiate them by similar offerings and services.
Go on, and now we find ourselves on a third stage; but now fast rising into a clearing atmosphere. The absolute worth of goodness is seen as distinct from power; such beings as these demon gods could not he the highest beings. Good and evil could not coexist in one Supreme; absolutely different in nature, they could not have a common origin; the moral world is bipolar, and we have dualism, the two principles, coeternal, coequal.
By and by, again, the horizon widens. The ultimate identity of might and right glimmers out feebly in the Zenda Vesta as the stars come out above the mountains when we climb out of the mist of the valleys. The evil spirit is no longer the absolute independent Ahriman; but Ahriman and Ormuzd are but each a dependent spirit; and an awful formless, boundless figure, the eternal, the illimitable, looms out from the abyss behind them, presently to degrade still farther the falling Ahriman into a mere permitted Satan, finally to be destroyed.