Top 100 Housman Quotes
#1. Good night; ensured release, Imperishable peace, Have these for yours. * While sky and sea and land And earth's foundations stand And heaven endures. *These three lines are on the tablet over Housman's grave in the parish church at Ludlow, Shropshire, England
A.E. Housman
#2. Reading about Queen Victoria has been a passion of mine since, as a child, I came across Laurence Housman's play 'Happy and Glorious,' with its Ernest Shepard illustrations.
A. N. Wilson
#3. Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but and absolutely marvellous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar.
A.E. Housman
#4. The pain done to Housman allowed him to rise above the mediocre and to find the words that most of us need help in order to say. The price paid by Housman was a life alone; the righteous rhymer enduring each year unloved and unable to love:
Morrissey
#5. The toil of all that be Helps not the primal fault; It rains into the sea, And still the sea is salt. A. E. HOUSMAN MORE POEMS
Arthur C. Clarke
#6. Housman ran the same analysis for absences from work. The pattern was the same: Firefox and Chrome users were 19 percent less likely to miss work than Internet Explorer and Safari fans.
Adam M. Grant
#7. The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
A.E. Housman
#8. It is the sincerest thing I have written, caught by the drama of a soul struggling in the contrary toils of love and religion - death brought them into harmony.
Laurence Housman
#9. When the journey's over/There'll be time enough to sleep.
A.E. Housman
#10. You smile upon your friend to-day, To-day his ills are over; You hearken to the lover's say, And happy is the lover. 'Tis late to hearken, late to smile, But better late than never: I shall have lived a little while Before I die for ever.
A.E. Housman
#11. His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.
A.E. Housman
#12. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.
A.E. Housman
#13. Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.
A.E. Housman
#14. Lie you easy, dream you light,
And sleep you fast for aye;
And luckier may you find the night
Than ever you found the day.
A.E. Housman
#15. Father eternal, ruler of creation, Spirit of life, which moved ere form was made Through the thick darkness covering every nation Light to man's blindness, O be Thou our aid.
Laurence Housman
#16. They put arsenic in his meat And stared aghast to watch him eat; They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up.
A.E. Housman
#17. I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
A.E. Housman
#18. The man who bears my name, and who claims to be me, was born on July 15, 1865, the sixth in a family of seven. He was an ugly child, and remained ugly till his eighteenth year, when his looks gradually improved.
Laurence Housman
#19. I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.
A.E. Housman
#20. The laws of God, the laws of man he may keep that will and can; not I: let God and man decree laws for themselves and not for me.
A.E. Housman
#21. Two more years were to go by before I knew anything about William Blake. Many years later, when his wife died, my godfather gave me the two books as a remembrance.
Laurence Housman
#22. Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.
A.E. Housman
#23. If nature had arranged that husbands and wives should have children alternatively, there would never be more than three in a family.
Laurence Housman
#24. Hope lies to mortals And most believe her, But man's deceiver Was never mine.
A.E. Housman
#25. The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady;
So I was ready
When trouble came.
A.E. Housman
#26. I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe.
Laurence Housman
#27. In the morning, in the morning,
In the happy field of hay,
Oh they looked at one another
By the light of day.
In the blue and silver morning
On the haycock as they lay,
Oh they looked at one another
And they looked away.
A.E. Housman
#28. Now hollow fires burn out to black, And lights are guttering low: Square your shoulders, lift your pack And leave your friends and go.
A.E. Housman
#29. Tomorrow, more's the pity, Away we both must hie, To air the ditty and to earth I.
A.E. Housman
#30. Like lightning she snatched her axe, and struck him on the neck - deep - once - twice - his life-blood gushed out, staining her feet.
The stars touched midnight.
Clemence Housman
#31. Be more than just,' said Durnor, 'for those who deserve love least do need it most.
Clemence Housman
#32. The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;
He has devoured the infant child.
The infant child is not aware
It has been eaten by a bear."
"Infant Innocence
A.E. Housman
#33. I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.
A.E. Housman
#34. The half-moon westers low, my love,
And the wind brings up the rain;
And wide apart lie we, my love,
And seas between the twain.
I know not if it rains, my love,
In the land where you do lie;
And oh, so sound you sleep, my love,
You know no more than I.
A.E. Housman
#35. Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.
A.E. Housman
#36. I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
A.E. Housman
#37. Good religious poetry ... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.
A.E. Housman
#38. Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.
A.E. Housman
#39. The mortal sickness of a mind too unhappy to be kind.
A.E. Housman
#40. Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.
Laurence Housman
#41. I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.
Laurence Housman
#42. To stand up straight and tread the turning mill,
To lie flat and know nothing and be still,
Are the two trades of man; and which is worse
I know not, but I know that both are ill.
A.E. Housman
#43. Stone, steel, dominions pass,
Faith too, no wonder;
So leave alone the grass
That I am under.
A.E. Housman
#44. Happy bridegroom, Hesper brings All desired and timely things. All whom morning sends to roam, Hesper loves to lead them home. Home return who him behold, Child to mother, sheep to fold, Bird to nest from wandering wide: Happy bridegroom, seek your bride.
A.E. Housman
#45. ...down in lovely muck I've lain,
Happy till I woke again.
A.E. Housman
#46. Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
A.E. Housman
#47. Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
A.E. Housman
#48. They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.
A.E. Housman
#49. For the last half of my life I have had the doubtful benefit of a brother whose literary reputation is much greater than my own.
Laurence Housman
#50. The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
A.E. Housman
#51. It is right and natural that generous minds while in the twenties should think the books which try to reform the world's wrong the greatest of all.
Laurence Housman
#52. The modern form of things had begun to appeal to me, also (as material for satire) politics, and the lives of the great and little, high up in the social scale.
Laurence Housman
#53. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough.
A.E. Housman
#54. Oh tarnish late on Wenlock Edge,
Gold that I never see;
Lie long high snowdrifts in the hedge
That will not shower on me.
A.E. Housman
#56. June suns, you cannot store them To warm the winter's cold, The lad that hopes for heaven Shall fill his mouth with mould.
A.E. Housman
#57. I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.
A.E. Housman
#58. They say my verse is sad: no wonder; Its narrow measure spans Tears of eternity, and sorrow, Not mine. but man's.
A.E. Housman
#59. I shall not die young, for I am already near seventy: I may die old.
Laurence Housman
#60. This is for all ill-treated fellows Unborn and unbegot, For them to read when they're in trouble And I am not.
A.E. Housman
#61. Look not in my eyes, for fear
They mirror true the sight I see,
And there you find your face too clear
And love it and be lost like me.
A.E. Housman
#63. Some men are more interesting than their books but my book is more interesting than its man.
A.E. Housman
#64. The rainy Pleiads wester Orion plunges prone, And midnight strikes and hastens, And I lie down alone.
A.E. Housman
#65. Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
A.E. Housman
#66. Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays, For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways.
A.E. Housman
#67. Ten thousand times I've done my best and all's to do again.
A.E. Housman
#68. Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again.
A.E. Housman
#69. If I live for another ten years I shall probably have written all that I want to write.
Laurence Housman
#70. Good creatures, do you love your lives
And have you ears for sense?
Here is a knife like other knives,
That cost me eighteen pence.
I need but stick it in my heart
And down will come the sky,
And earth's foundations will depart
And all you folk will die.
A.E. Housman
#71. If I loved all the world as I do you, I shouldn't write books to it: I should only write letters to it, and that would be only a clumsy stage on the way to entire telepathy.
Laurence Housman
#72. My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.
Laurence Housman
#73. A saint is one who makes goodness attractive. Surely, a great teacher does the same thing for education.
Laurence Housman
#74. 'Tis spring; come out to ramble
The hilly brakes around,
For under thorn and bramble
About the hollow ground
The primroses are found.
And there's the windflower chilly
With all the winds at play,
And there's the Lenten lily
That has not long to stay
And dies on Easter day.
A.E. Housman
#75. The bells they sound on Bredon, And still the steeples hum. "Come all to church, good people"- Oh, noisy bells, be dumb; I hear you, I will come.
A.E. Housman
#76. The weeping Pleiads wester,
And the moon is under seas;
From bourn to bourn of midnight
Far sighs the rainy breeze:
It sighs from a lost country
To a land I have not known;
The weeping Pleiads wester,
And I lie down alone.
A.E. Housman
#77. Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
A.E. Housman
#78. First don: O cuckoo, shall I call thee bird,
Or but a wandering voice?
Second don: State the alternative preferred,
With reasons for your choice.
A.E. Housman
#79. That was luck: I should not then have been a conscientious objector; but I am quite sure that the abominations of war would have made me one, as soon as I got to the front.
Laurence Housman
#80. The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.
A.E. Housman
#81. The mere dates of my existence do not interest me, except in one connection. When the Great War started I was too old to be acceptable as a volunteer; when conscription followed I was too old to be conscripted.
Laurence Housman
#82. Oh I have been to Ludlow fair, and left my necktie God knows where. And carried half way home, or near, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer.
A.E. Housman
#83. With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipped maiden And many a lightfoot lad.
A.E. Housman
#84. When the bells justle in the tower
The hollow night amid,
Then on my tongue the taste is sour
Of all I ever did.
A.E. Housman
#85. The last hour from midnight had lost half its quarters, and the stars went lifting up the great minutes ...
Clemence Housman
#86. There's this to say of love and breath
They give a man a taste for death.
A.E. Housman
#87. It nods and curtseys and recovers
When the wind blows above,
The nettle on the graves of lovers
That hanged themselves for love.
The nettle nods, the wind blows over,
The man, he does not move,
The lover of the grave, the lover
That hanged himself for love.
A.E. Housman
#88. Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
A.E. Housman
#89. Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies, But keep your fancy free.
A.E. Housman
#90. Wanderers eastward, wanderers west,
Know you why you cannot rest?
'Tis that every mother's son
Travails with a skeleton.
Lie down in the bed of dust;
Bear the fruit that bear you must;
Bring the eternal seed to light,
And morn is all the same as night.
A.E. Housman
#91. I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health.
A.E. Housman
#92. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
A.E. Housman
#93. If a man will comprehend the richness and variety of the universe, and inspire his mind with a due measure of wonder and awe, he must contemplate the human intellect not only on its heights of genius but in its abysses of ineptitude ...
A.E. Housman
#94. A moment's thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.
A.E. Housman
#95. I have always been a writer of letters, and of long ones; so, when I first thought of writing a book in the form of letters, I knew that I could do it quickly and easily.
Laurence Housman
#96. And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears.
A.E. Housman
#97. To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.
A.E. Housman
#98. Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
A.E. Housman
#99. The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.
(Introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, 3 October 1892)
A.E. Housman
#100. These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. The British regulars who made the retreat from Mons, beginning August 24, 1914.
A.E. Housman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
