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Life is worth Living Through every grain of it, From the foundations To the last edge Of the cornerstone, death.

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
Death
Grain
Every
Edge
Life
Edges
Foundation
Worth
Lasts
Last
Cornerstone
Living
Foundations

More quotes by 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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Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.
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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Who but knows How it goes! Life's a last year's Nightingale, Love's a last year's rose.
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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Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
William Ernest Henley
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Into the winter's gray delight, Into the summer's golden dream, Holy and high and impartial, Death, the mother of Life, Mingles all men for ever.
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.
William Ernest Henley
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There are two men in Tolstoy. He is a mystic and he is also a realist. He is addicted to the practice of a pietism that for all its sincerity is nothing if not vague and sentimental and he is the most acute and dispassionate of observers, the most profound and earnest student of character and emotion.
William Ernest Henley
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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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So many are the deaths we die Before we can be dead indeed.
William Ernest Henley
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[T]hey stretch you on a table. Then they bid you close your eyelids, And they mask you with a napkin, And the anæsthetic reaches Hot and subtle through your being.
William Ernest Henley
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Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame.
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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Men may scoff, and men may pray, But they pay Every pleasure with a pain.
William Ernest Henley
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Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep.
William Ernest Henley
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Open your heart and take us in, Love-love and me.
William Ernest Henley
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Here is the ghost Of a summer that lived for us, Ere is a promise Of summer to be.
William Ernest Henley
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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.
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