Life & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats’s line lands like a sneer disguised as diagnosis: extremism isn’t framed as bravery or conviction, but as a symptom of hollowness. “Empty souls” isn’t just an insult; it’s a spiritual and cultural category. For Yeats, who spent his life toggling between mysticism and hard political disillusionment, emptiness suggests an inner life unformed by discipline, art, or genuine contact with complexity. And when that inner life is vacant, the mind reaches for something loud enough to fill it.

The craft is in the verb “tend.” He’s not talking about villains so much as physics: if there’s no weight inside you, you drift toward the most gravitational ideas in the room. “Extreme opinions” become a cheap substitute for identity, a way to purchase significance without earning it. The subtext is cruelly modern: absolutism as self-fashioning, ideology as an outfit you wear because your real self feels thin.

Context matters. Yeats watched Ireland convulse through nationalism, revolution, civil war, and the later flirtations with authoritarian aesthetics that tempted parts of Europe (and, at moments, Yeats himself). He knew the seduction of grand narratives and the psychic comfort of certainty. This aphorism reads like a correction he’s making not only to the crowd but to his own era’s intellectual vanity: the louder the certainty, the more likely it’s compensating for an interior deficit.

It works because it refuses to dignify extremes as purely intellectual. Yeats drags them back into psychology and spirit, where motives are messier, and where the real enemy isn’t disagreement but emptiness hungry for a cause.