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In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud: Under the bludgeoning of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.

William Ernest Henley

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William Ernest Henley
Age: 53 †
Born: 1849
Born: August 23
Died: 1903
Died: July 11
Editor
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
W. E. Henley
Bloody
Cried
Fell
Winced
Circumstances
Unconquerable
Head
Clutch
Chance
Unafraid
Aloud
Circumstance

More quotes by William Ernest Henley

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It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley
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For it's home, dearie, home--it's home I want to be. Our topsails are hoisted, and we'll away to sea. O, the oak and the ash and the bonnie birken tree They're all growing green in the old countrie.
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Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.
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This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.
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Life - life - let there be life! Better a thousand times the roaring hours When wave and wind, Like the Arch-Murderer in flight From the Avenger at his heel, Storm through the desolate fastnesses And wild waste places of the world!
William Ernest Henley
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The nightingale has a lyre of gold, The lark's is a clarion call, And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute, But I love him best of all. For his song is all the joy of life, And we in the mad spring weather, We two have listened till he sang Our hearts and lips together.
William Ernest Henley
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So be my passing! My task accomplished and the long day done, My wages taken, and in my heart Some late lark singing, Let me be gathered in the quiet west, The sundown splendid and serene, Death.
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Life - life - life! 'Tis the sole great thing This side of death, Heart on heart in the wonder of Spring!
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Men may scoff, and men may pray, But they pay Every pleasure with a pain.
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Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep.
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Were I so tall as to reach the pole or grasp the ocean at a span, I must be measured by my soul. The mind is the standard of the man.
William Ernest Henley
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Life - give me life until the end, That at the very top of being, The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, Out of the reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The immortal, incommunicable dream.
William Ernest Henley
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I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
William Ernest Henley
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beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade
William Ernest Henley
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It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.
William Ernest Henley
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Life - life - let there be life!
William Ernest Henley
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Pointed criticism, if accurate, often gives the artist an inner sense of relief. The criticism that damages is that which disparages, dismisses, ridicules, or condemns.
William Ernest Henley
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Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.
William Ernest Henley
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So many are the deaths we die Before we can be dead indeed.
William Ernest Henley
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The life of Dumas is not only a monument of endeavour and success, it is a sort of labyrinth as well. It abounds in pseudonyms and disguises, in sudden and unexpected appearances and retreats as unexpected and sudden, in scandals and in rumours, in mysteries and traps and ambuscades of every kind.
William Ernest Henley