William Butler Yeats Quotes

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.

Oblivion is the rule and fame the exception, of humanity.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

We all go to our grave thinking that we will never be forgotten, and we are forgotten ten minutes later.

Life is like a fire. Flames which the passer-by forgets. Ashes which the wind scatters. A man lived.

Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

The Z’s will kill us all, and then the Z’s will die out and in sixty years there will be no one to remember our silly war, Caroline’s wasted ammunition, my year of zombic survivalism, Rene DesCartes’s musings, or Michelangelo’s sculptures. And that is really only the sadness here as I drink a thousand-dollar bottle of wine down here in the cellar: We did a few things worth remembering, and I wish for someone to remember them.

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

A man that simply loads himself down with possessions of which he has no actual need, when he dies slips out of them--as a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into which it has ensconced itself--into the grave, and is forgotten.

Time erases both the best and the worst of us.

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

You could get the money, you can get the power, but keep your eyes on the final hour.

Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

I don't expect to live forever, nor do I repine over that, but I am weak enough to want to be remembered forever. - Yet how few of those who have lived, even of those who have accomplished far more than I have, linger on in world memory for even a single century after death

Seeking to perpetuate one's name on earth is like writing on the sand by the seashore; to be perpetual it must be written on eternal shores.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn't even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there's no idea to which one doesn't get acclimatized in time.