Seamus Heaney

You lose more of yourself than you redeem

Doing the decent thing

From his 1984 poem, "Station Island."  Heaney, who was born in Northern Ireland in 1939, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.  Robert Lowell has called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats," and his books outsell those of all other living poets combined in the UK. 

Seamus Heaney