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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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William Ernest Henley
Age: 53 †
Born: 1849
Born: August 23
Died: 1903
Died: July 11
Editor
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
W. E. Henley
Standards
Ocean
Reach
Pole
Soul
Span
Must
Measured
Mind
Grasp
Men
Tall
Life
Standard
More quotes by 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
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
Men may scoff, and men may pray, But they pay Every pleasure with a pain.
William Ernest Henley
Who but knows How it goes! Life's a last year's Nightingale, Love's a last year's rose.
William Ernest Henley
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
Open your heart and take us in, Love-love and me.
William Ernest Henley
Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.
William Ernest Henley
beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade
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
[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
Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
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
And lo, the Hospital, gray, quiet, old, Where life and death like friendly chafferers meet.
William Ernest Henley
Life is worth Living Through every grain of it, From the foundations To the last edge Of the cornerstone, death.
William Ernest Henley
Life - life - let there be life!
William Ernest Henley
Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame.
William Ernest Henley
I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
William Ernest Henley
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
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
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
