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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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William Ernest Henley
Age: 53 †
Born: 1849
Born: August 23
Died: 1903
Died: July 11
Editor
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
W. E. Henley
Believe
Written
Hesitate
Way
Often
Writes
Write
Shakespeare
Seems
Ill
Ever
Extremely
Wells
Putting
Well
Thus
Abominable
Writing
Seem
Supremely

More quotes by 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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Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep.
William Ernest Henley
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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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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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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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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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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 - 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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O, it's die we must, but it's live we can, And the marvel of earth and sun Is all for the joy of woman and man And the longing that makes them one. (Between the Dusk of a Summer Night, 13-16)
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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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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And lo, the Hospital, gray, quiet, old, Where life and death like friendly chafferers meet.
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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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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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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Open your heart and take us in, Love-love and me.
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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Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.
William Ernest Henley
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A late lark twitters from the quiet skies.
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