WB Yeats

When you are old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

We only begin to live when we conceive life as tragedy...

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

Only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind--sex and the dead.

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary men and women.