Success Quote by William Butler Yeats

Anger, Yeats suggests, is only worth the candle if you plan to burn the whole house down. The line is funny in its bleak arithmetic: temper isn’t treated as a moral lapse or a regrettable “loss of control,” but as an investment strategy. If you’re going to spend the social capital and spiritual energy required to flare up, do it with compounding interest. Anything less is amateur hour.

The subtext is a pointed distrust of performative outrage. A half-formed temper tantrum doesn’t cleanse or clarify; it just exposes you. Yeats’s “one is certain” reads like a jab at people who confuse feeling with conviction. He’s not praising rage as righteousness. He’s warning that anger, once revealed, creates expectations: you’ve declared stakes, you’ve announced a boundary, you’ve invited resistance. If you can’t sustain the escalation “to the end,” you’ll be negotiated down, mocked, or, worst of all, ignored.

Context matters: Yeats lived through Irish revolutionary politics, cultural nationalism, and the violent churn of early 20th-century Europe. He watched public passions ignite, fade, and get repurposed. His poetry and public life circle the theme of willpower under pressure; this aphorism reads like a distillation of that worldview. Temper here becomes a discipline, not a slip. It’s an almost military rule of engagement: don’t draw the sword unless you’re ready to keep swinging.