William Ernest Henley Quotes

Life - life - life! 'Tis the sole great thing
This side of death,
Heart on heart in the wonder of Spring!

Who but knows
How it goes!
Life's a last year's Nightingale,
Love's a last year's rose.

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

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.

And lo, the Hospital, gray, quiet, old, Where life and death like friendly chafferers meet.

Out of the starless night that covers me,
(O tribulation of the wind that rolls!)
Black as the cloud of some tremendous spell,
The susurration of the sighing sea
Sounds like the sobbing whisper of two souls
That tremble in a passion of farewell.
To the desires that trebled life in me,
(O melancholy of the wind that rolls!)
The dreams that seemed the future to foretell,
The hopes that mounted herward like the sea,
To all the sweet things sent on happy souls,
I cannot choose but bid a mute farewell.
And to the girl who was so much to me
(O lamentation of this wind that rolls!)
Since I may not the life of her compel,
Out of the night, beside the sounding sea,
Full of the love that might have blent our souls,
A sad, a last, a long, supreme farewell.

[T]hey stretch you on a table. Then they bid you close your eyelids, And they mask you with a napkin, And the anaesthetic reaches Hot and subtle through your being.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame.

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.

I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

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.

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.

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.

Thick is the darkness
Sunward, O, sunward!
Rough is the highway
Onward, still onward!
Dawn harbors surely
East of the shadows.
Facing us somewhere
Spread the sweet meadows.
Upward and forward!
Time will restore us:
Light is above us,
Rest is before us.

In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud: Under the bludgeoning of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.

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.

I am the master of my own fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies.

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.

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.

Here is the ghost
Of a summer that lived for us,
Ere is a promise
Of summer to be.

Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.

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.

Master of masters,
O maker of heroes,
Thunder the brave,
Irresistible message:
'Life is worth living
Through every grain of it
From the foundations
To the last edge
Of the cornerstone, death.