William Butler Yeats Quotes

Old men, what are they? Fast fading the leaf, Three-footed they walk, yet frail as a child, As a dream set afloat in the daylight.

We tried not to age, but time had its rage.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

One time, I was young. I was skinny. I was elegant. Getting old is terrible.

Old age is a shipwreck.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

The word that scares the hell out of me is 'frail.' I don't want to be frail.

I have lived long enough. My way of life is to fall into the sere, the yellow leaf, and that which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends I must not look to have.

An old mans staffe is the rapper of deaths doore.

I'm not tough anymore, I'm 82.

I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.

Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

Every time I think that I'm getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.

I am fine with the fact that some of my hair is gray. If it was all gray overnight, that would be a scary thing.

The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.

Don't get old, if you can avoid it.

I have been asked how I grow old so easily. The answer is: I give all my time to it.

Why, I am about doing very well, for I am preparing myself, sir, for a place where hardly any majors, and very few Lieutenant-Generals go. God save us, why should there be such a bustle about the taking off of an old grey head that cannot get up three steps without two men to support it?

Of course, it's no fun getting old and getting sick and dying; we all know that's coming, and it's a bore.

Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?

The sign of death is weakness.

So may'st thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop Into thy mother's lap.