“Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through fog and filthy air.”
Variant: Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Source: Macbeth
“Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied.”
Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1471/, st. 2
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
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Do you have more details about the quote "Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor…" by W.B. Yeats?
W.B. Yeats 255
Irish poet and playwright 1865–1939Related quotes
as quoted in "Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism" by Robert Skidelsy http://www.webcitation.org/query?id=1256603608595872&url=www.geocities.com/monedem/keyn.html
Essays in Persuasion (1931), Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Context: When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease … But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
“Friendship: A ship big enough for two in fair weather, but only one in foul.”
Ambrose Bierce
(1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
“Times go by turns and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.”
Robert Southwell
(1561–1595) English Jesuit
Source: Times Go by Turns, Line 5; p. 47.
John Denham
(1615–1669) English poet and courtier
On Mr. John Fletcher's Works. Compare: "Poets are sultans, if they had their will; For every author would his brother kill", Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery, Prologues (republished in Dramatic Works, 1739); "Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne", Alexander Pope, Prologue to the Satires, line 197.
“The belly has no ears nor is it to be filled with fair words.”
Original: …l'estomach affamé n'a poinct d'aureilles, il n'oyt goutte.
Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Fourth Book (1548, 1552), Chapter 63.
It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philospher, delights the camelion poet.
Letter to Richard Woodhouse (October 27, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)
