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A. E. Housman Quotes
112 Sourced Quotes
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Cambridge has seen many strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. It is now destined to see a better scholar than Wordsworth and a better poet than Porson betwixt and between.
A. E. Housman
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Hope lies to mortals
And most believe her,
But man's deceiver
Was never mine.
A. E. Housman
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You must not treat my immortal works as quarries to be used at will by the various hacks whom you may employ to compile anthologies.
A. E. Housman
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Indeed – very good. I shall – have to repeat – that – on the Golden Floor.
A. E. Housman
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My heart always warms to people who do not come to see me, especially Americans, to whom it seems to be more of an effort.
A. E. Housman
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I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.
A. E. Housman
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Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.
A. E. Housman
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They put arsenic in his meat And stared aghast to watch him eat; They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up.
A. E. Housman
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Some men are more interesting than their books but my book is more interesting than its man.
A. E. Housman
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I sought them far and found them, The sure, the straight, the brave, The hearts I lost my own to, The souls I could not save They braced their belts about them, They crossed in ships the sea, They sought and found six feet of ground, And there they died for me.
A. E. Housman
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To think that two and two are four And neither five nor three The heart of man has long been sore And long 'tis like to be.
A. E. Housman
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Look not in my eyes, for fear
They mirror true the sight I see,
And there you find your face too clear
And love it and be lost like me.
A. E. Housman
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Who made the world I cannot tell;
'Tis made, and here am I in hell.
My hand, though now my knuckles bleed,
I never soiled with such a deed.
A. E. Housman
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Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?
Oh that was right, lad, that was brave.
A. E. Housman
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Nature, not content with denying to Mr — the faculty of thought, has endowed him with the faculty of writing.
A. E. Housman
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Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
A. E. Housman
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It is supposed that there has been progress in the science of textual criticism, and the most frivolous pretender has learned to talk superciliously about "the old unscientific days". The old unscientific days are everlasting; they are here and now; they are renewed perennially by the ear which takes formulas in, and the tongue which gives them out again, and the mind which meanwhile is empty of reflexion and stuffed with self-complacency.
A. E. Housman
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Oh tarnish late on Wenlock Edge,
Gold that I never see;
Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge
That will not shower on me.
A. E. Housman
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The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.
A. E. Housman
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The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Now I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me.
A. E. Housman
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The rainy Pleiads wester,
Orion plunges prone,
The stroke of midnight ceases,
And I lie down alone.
A. E. Housman
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Chorus:
O suitably attired in leather boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My object in inquiring is to know.
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,
Nod with your hand to signify as much.
Alcmaeon:
I journeyed hither a Boeotian road.
Chorus:
Sailing on horseback or with feet for oars?
Alcmaeon:
Plying by turns my partnership of legs.
Chorus:
Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
Alcmaeon:
Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
Chorus:
To learn your name would not displease me much.
Alcmaeon:
Not all that men desire do they attain.
A. E. Housman
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To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high, we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
A. E. Housman
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My inclination to go by the Air Express is confirmed by the crash they had yesterday, which will make them more careful in the immediate future.
A. E. Housman
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We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.
A. E. Housman
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
A. E. Housman
Wikipedia
Born:
March 26, 1859
Died:
April 30, 1936
(aged 77)
Bio:
Alfred Edward Housman, usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad.
Known for:
A Shropshire Lad (1887)
Last Poems (1922)
The name and nature of poetry (1933)
Collected Poems and Selected Prose
Most used words:
man
day
lie
land
poetry
heart
morning
heaven
lad
night
bear
trouble
sky
stand
high
A. E. Housman on Wikipedia
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