Life & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats knows self-help advice is too polite to land a punch, so he gives you a hillside and a bucket: one bad pull and gravity does the rest. “Choose your companions from the best” isn’t merely social climbing; it’s a hard-edged theory of moral physics. Character, in this worldview, is less an inner flame than a posture you have to keep bracing. Let your weight lean the wrong way - toward “the rest,” the crowd, the easy company, the lazy consensus - and you don’t just drift. You topple.

The line’s bite comes from its refusal to flatter the reader’s autonomy. Yeats implies we are permeable creatures, shaped by proximity, habits, and imitation. Companionship isn’t background noise; it’s a rigging system. The bucket image is especially cruel because it’s humble and domestic: this is not a heroic fall from a cliff, but a daily, almost boring surrender. One routine act of joining in can set the slide in motion.

Context matters: Yeats is a poet of hierarchies, aristocratic temperament, and national destiny, writing in an Ireland racked by cultural revival, political upheaval, and mass movements. He admired discipline and “unity of being,” and distrusted the levelling force of the crowd. The subtext isn’t just “pick better friends.” It’s “guard your inner standard against contagion.” In Yeats’s hands, society is a slope, and every friendship is a foothold - or a slip.