Life & Wisdom Quote by Seamus Heaney

Heaney’s line lands like advice and a dare: don’t mistake safety for integrity. “Risk” and “truth” aren’t posed as lofty virtues; they’re paired like twin costs of living awake. The phrasing “to yourselves and the world before you” refuses the easy split between private authenticity and public responsibility. Heaney suggests the self isn’t a sealed room where truth can be kept pristine. It has consequences. It makes claims on how you show up in a world that will push back.

The subtext is classic Heaney: ethical pressure without sermonizing. He came up amid Northern Ireland’s violence, where language was never neutral and “truth” could be a weapon, a confession, or a refusal. For a poet in that environment, risk isn’t metaphorical. To speak plainly could estrange you from your community; to stay lyrical could look like evasion. The line captures that tightrope walk: truth demands exposure, and exposure is peril.

Notice the syntax: not “risk and truth in” but “risk and truth to” yourselves. It’s an obligation, almost an offering, as if honesty is something you must deliver to your own conscience as much as to history. “The world before you” adds a forward tilt, suggesting a stage, a jury, a future you can’t bargain with.

The intent feels less like reassurance than permission: to be accurate, to be seen, to accept that the cleanest sentence may be the one that costs you something.