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The mortal sickness of a mind too unhappy to be kind.
A. E. Housman
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A. E. Housman
Age: 77 †
Born: 1859
Born: January 1
Died: 1936
Died: January 1
Classical Philologist
Classical Scholar
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Worcs
A. E. Housman
Mind
Mortal
Sickness
Mortals
Unhappy
Joy
Happiness
Kind
More quotes by A. E. Housman
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
White in the moon the long road lies.
A. E. Housman
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
All knots that lovers tie Are tied to sever. Here shall your sweetheart lie, Untrue for ever.
A. E. Housman
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
Into my hear an air that kills through yon far country blows what are those blue remembered hills what spires,what farms are those? that is the land of lost content I can see it shining plain the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.
A. E. Housman
Mithridates, he died old. Housman's passage is based on the belief of the ancients that Mithridates the Great [c. 135-63 B.C.] had so saturated his body with poisons that none could injure him. When captured by the Romans he tried in vain to poison himself, then ordered a Gallic mercenary to kill him.
A. E. Housman
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
And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.
A. E. Housman
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
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
Could man be drunk for ever With liquor, love, or fights, Lief should I rouse at morning And lief lie down of nights. But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts, And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts.
A. E. Housman
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
A moment's thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process.
A. E. Housman
Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily.
A. E. Housman
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
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.
A. E. Housman
And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
A. E. Housman
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
A. E. Housman
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.
A. E. Housman
