Top 100 Housman's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
A.E. Housman
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. '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
#10. A saint is one who makes goodness attractive. Surely, a great teacher does the same thing for education.
Laurence Housman
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. If I live for another ten years I shall probably have written all that I want to write.
Laurence Housman
#15. Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again.
A.E. Housman
#16. Ten thousand times I've done my best and all's to do again.
A.E. Housman
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. The rainy Pleiads wester Orion plunges prone, And midnight strikes and hastens, And I lie down alone.
A.E. Housman
#20. Some men are more interesting than their books but my book is more interesting than its man.
A.E. Housman
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I shall not die young, for I am already near seventy: I may die old.
Laurence Housman
#25. 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
#26. I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.
A.E. Housman
#28. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
A.E. Housman
#29. And while the sun and moon endure Luck's a chance but trouble's sure, I'd face it as a wise man would, And train for ill and not for good.
A.E. Housman
#30. On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;The wind it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
A.E. Housman
#31. Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's aware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey's over then there'll be time enough to sleep.
A.E. Housman
#32. Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
A.E. Housman
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears.
A.E. Housman
#37. 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
#38. A moment's thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.
A.E. Housman
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health.
A.E. Housman
#42. 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
#43. Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies, But keep your fancy free.
A.E. Housman
#44. Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
A.E. Housman
#45. 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
#46. There's this to say of love and breath
They give a man a taste for death.
A.E. Housman
#47. The last hour from midnight had lost half its quarters, and the stars went lifting up the great minutes ...
Clemence Housman
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Tomorrow, more's the pity, Away we both must hie, To air the ditty and to earth I.
A.E. Housman
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe.
Laurence Housman
#58. 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
#59. Hope lies to mortals And most believe her, But man's deceiver Was never mine.
A.E. Housman
#60. If nature had arranged that husbands and wives should have children alternatively, there would never be more than three in a family.
Laurence Housman
#61. Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.
A.E. Housman
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I do not choose the right word, I get rid of the wrong one.
A.E. Housman
#65. Be more than just,' said Durnor, 'for those who deserve love least do need it most.
Clemence Housman
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.
A.E. Housman
#72. His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.
A.E. Housman
#73. 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
#74. When the journey's over/There'll be time enough to sleep.
A.E. Housman
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Stone, steel, dominions pass,
Faith too, no wonder;
So leave alone the grass
That I am under.
A.E. Housman
#78. 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
#79. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough.
A.E. Housman
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
A.E. Housman
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
A.E. Housman
#86. 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
#87. ...down in lovely muck I've lain,
Happy till I woke again.
A.E. Housman
#88. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. The mortal sickness of a mind too unhappy to be kind.
A.E. Housman
#94. Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.
A.E. Housman
#95. Good religious poetry ... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.
A.E. Housman
#96. I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
A.E. Housman
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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