We for a certainty are not the first have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed whatever brute and blackguard made the world.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: Idealism, Ideals
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
Topics: Perseverance, Persistence, Adversity
I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of…. I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: Authors & Writing
The mortal sickness of a mind too unhappy to be kind.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: Service, Giving, Kindness
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: Snow
Give me a land of boughs in leaf
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen there is grief;
I love no leafless land.
—A. E. Housman
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
Topics: Remembrance
Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol
Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover Breath’s a ware that will not keep. Up lad: when the journey’s over There’ll be time enough to sleep.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: Morning
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: Alcohol, Alcoholism
Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: War
Good literature continually read for pleasure must, let us hope, 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
Topics: Reading
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After death has stopped the ears.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: Silence
In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.
—A. E. Housman
Topics: America
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Richard Livingstone British Scholar
- Edward Lear English Humorist, Illustrator
- J. B. S. Haldane British Biologist
- Adam Clarke British Methodist Scholar
- C. Northcote Parkinson British Historian
- Enoch Powell British Politician
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson British Poet
- Bertrand A. Russell British Philosopher, Mathematician
- Edith Sitwell British Poet
- Leigh Hunt British Author
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