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About this quote

What does it mean?
Yeats warns that excessive beauty can lead someone to value appearance over kindness and intimacy, preventing true friendship.
In plain terms
Too much beauty can make someone lose kindness and fail to find friends.
What can you take from it?
Beauty without kindness may isolate a person.

Where it applies

  • parenting advice
  • self-reflection
  • critiquing culture

Putting it to work

  • value inner traits
  • teach kindness
  • avoid vanity

Questions to consider

  • What matters more, looks or kindness?
  • Can you have both?

Another view

It oversimplifies how beauty and character coexist.

More from William Butler Yeats

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  3. I write it out in a verse- MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrib…

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