William Ernest Henley Quotes & Sayings

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. — William Ernest Henley

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

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

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

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

[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. — William Ernest Henley

Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep. — William Ernest Henley

Men may scoff, and men may pray, But they pay Every pleasure with a pain. — William Ernest Henley

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. — William Ernest Henley

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. — William Ernest Henley

To be a good Briton, a man must trade profitably, marry respectably, live cleanly, avoid excess, revere the established order, and wear his heart in his breeches pocket or anywhere but on his sleeve. — William Ernest Henley

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. — 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

I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. — William Ernest Henley

I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul — 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

Open your heart and take us in, Love-love and me. — 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

Pointed criticism, if accurate, often gives the artist an inner sense of relief. The criticism that damages is that which disparages, dismisses, ridicules, or condemns. — William Ernest Henley

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 Caesar and his fortunes - steady! — William Ernest Henley

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies. — William Ernest Henley

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! — 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

Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame. — William Ernest Henley

Balzac's ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail. — William Ernest Henley

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. — William Ernest Henley

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

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

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

I am the master of my own fate:
I am the captain of my soul. — William Ernest Henley

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. — William Ernest Henley

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. — 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

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

So many are the deaths we die
Before we can be dead indeed. — William Ernest Henley

Life - life - let there be life! — 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

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

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

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

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

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. — William Ernest Henley

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

Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion. — William Ernest Henley