Quote

Life is a smoke that curls- Curls in a flickering skein, That winds and whisks and whirls, A figment thin and vain, Into the vast inane. One end for hut and hall.

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
Vast
Figments
Vain
Flickering
Smoke
Huts
Wind
Curls
Skein
Ends
Winds
Whirls
Life
Hall
Inane
Halls
Whisk
Thin
Figment

More quotes by 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.
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Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
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Men may scoff, and men may pray, But they pay Every pleasure with a pain.
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I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
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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.
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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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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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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!
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Life - life - let there be life!
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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.
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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.
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Open your heart and take us in, Love-love and me.
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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.
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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 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
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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!
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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.
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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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Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep.
William Ernest Henley