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About this quote

What does it mean?
Yeats describes Shaw as an atheist who is secretly unsettled by the mystery he rejects.
In plain terms
Shaw denies God but is afraid of the mysteries he ignores.
What can you take from it?
Denying mystery does not mean escaping its fear.

Where it applies

  • debating religion
  • critiquing thinkers

Putting it to work

  • examine beliefs
  • confront doubt

Questions to consider

  • Can one truly deny the mystery?
  • Does doubt accompany disbelief?

Another view

It attributes internal feelings to another person without proof.

More from William Butler Yeats

  1. One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: …

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  2. This country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in, and it is most important that we should keep in this country a certa…

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  3. We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

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