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Life - life - life! 'Tis the sole great thing This side of death, Heart on heart in the wonder of Spring!
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
Heart
Thing
Sole
Life
Spring
Side
Sides
Wonder
Death
Great
More quotes by William Ernest Henley
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
So many are the deaths we die Before we can be dead indeed.
William Ernest Henley
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
Here is the ghost Of a summer that lived for us, Ere is a promise Of summer to be.
William Ernest Henley
[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
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
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
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
Open your heart and take us in, Love-love and me.
William Ernest Henley
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
beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade
William Ernest Henley
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
Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep.
William Ernest Henley
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.
William Ernest Henley
Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife.... The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform, The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.... [F]ace to face with chance, I shrink a little: My hopes are strong, my will is something weak. ...I am ready But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle: You carry Cæsar and his fortunes—steady!
William Ernest Henley
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
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
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.
William Ernest Henley
Madam Life's a piece in bloom Death goes dogging everywhere: she's the tenant of the room, he's the ruffian on the stair.
William Ernest Henley
A late lark twitters from the quiet skies.
William Ernest Henley
