William Ernest Quotes & Sayings

The only thing that can set aside a law as wrong is a better law, or an idea of a better law. And the only thing that an give a law the quality of better or worse is the concrete result which it promotes or fails to promote. — William Ernest Hocking

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

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal. — Dave Barry

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

Principle I:;: Legal rights are presumptive rights. — William Ernest Hocking

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

Every social need, such as the need for friendship, must be a party to its own satisfaction: I cannot passively find my friend as a ready-made friend; a ready-made human being he may be, but his friendship for me I must help to create by my own active resolve. — William Ernest Hocking

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

No religion is a true religion that does not make men tingle to their finger tips with a sense of infinite hazard. — William Ernest Hocking

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

[Ernest ]Hemingway always said, "Write about what you know." I think you can do that, and if you want to write about what you don't know, you can. It just takes a lot more work. — William T. Vollmann

A person who wills to have a good will, already has a good will
in its rudiments. There is solid satisfaction in knowing that the mere desire to get out of an old habit is a material advance upon the condition of submergence in that habit. The longest step toward cleanliness is made when one gains
nothing but dissatisfaction with dirt. — William Ernest Hocking

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

Even with a Democratic president behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a far larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for it. Eminent Democratic luminaries voted against it, including Senators Ernest Hollings, Richard Russell, Sam Ervin, Albert Gore Sr., J. William Fulbright (Bill Clinton's mentor) and of course, Robert Byrd. Overall, 82 percent of Senate Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, compared to only 66 percent of Democrats. In the House, 80 percent of Republicans voted for it, while only 63 percent of Democrats did.
Crediting Democrats for finally coming on board with Republicans civil rights policies by supporting the 1964 act would be nearly as absurd as giving the Democrats all the glory for Regan's 1981 tax cuts - which passed with the support of 99 percent of Republicans but only 29 percent of Democrats. — Ann Coulter

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

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

Mr. Rihani, we met once a thousand years ago and we may not meet again for another thousand years. — William Ernest Hocking

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

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

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

I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul — William Ernest Henley

What our view of the effectiveness of religion in history does at once make evident as to its nature is
first, its necessary distinction; second, its necessary supremacy. These characters though external have been so essential to its fruitfulness, as to justify the statement that without them religion is not religion. A merged religion and a negligible or subordinate religion are no religion. — William Ernest Hocking

Pure community is a matter of no interest to any will; but a community which pursues a common good is of supreme interest to all wills; and what we have here said is that whatever the nature of that common good ... it must contain the development of individual powers, as a prior condition for all other goods. — William Ernest Hocking

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

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

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary — Pat Conroy

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

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

However rich we may become in knowledge of the deeper causes of historical results, we forgo all understanding of history if we forget this inner continuity,
i.e., the conscious intentions of the participants in history-making and their consciously known successes. — William Ernest Hocking

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

Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure. — William Ernest Hocking

Only by following out the injunction of our great predecessor [William Harvey] to search out and study the secrets of Nature by way of experiment, can we hope to attain to a comprehension of 'the wisdom of the body and the understanding of the heart,' and thereby to the mastery of disease and pain, which will enable us to relieve the burden of mankind. — Ernest Starling

I find that a man is as old as his work. If his work keeps him from moving forward, he will look forward with the work. — William Ernest Hocking

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

Principle II:;: The presumptions of the law are creative presumptions:;: they are aimed at conditions to be brought about, and only for that reason ignore conditions which exist. — William Ernest Hocking

Art is life, plus caprice. — William Ernest Hocking

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

Principle III:;: Presumptive rights are the conditions under which individual powers normally develop. — William Ernest Hocking

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

The various estimates of the height of the true summit vary considerably, but by taking an average of these figures it is possible to say confidently that the summit of Rum Doodle is 40,000 1/2 feet above sea level. — William Ernest Bowman

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies. — 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

Today's culture is unfortunately inseparable from economic and military power. A ruling nation can impose its culture and give a worldwide fame to a second-rate writer like (Ernest Hemingway). (John Steinbeck) is important due to American guns. Had (John Dos Passos) and (William Faulkner) been born in Paraguay or in Turkey, who'd read them? — Luis Bunuel

In New York in the 1910s, William B. Coley, James Ewing, and Ernest Codman had treated bone sarcomas with a mixture of bacterial toxins - the so-called Coley's toxin. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

It is right, or absolute right, that an individual should develop the powers that are in him. He may be said to have a "natural right" to become what he is capable of becoming. This is his only natural right. — William Ernest Hocking

Life - life - let there be life! — William Ernest Henley

Nothing is more evident, I venture to think, as a result of two or three thousand years of social philosophizing, than that society must live and thrive by way of the native impulses of individual human beings. — William Ernest Hocking

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
(on Ernest Hemingway — William Faulkner

We cannot swing up a rope that is attached only to our own belt. — William Ernest Hocking

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

This merely formal conceiving of the facts of one's own wretchedness is at the same time a departure from them
placing them in the object. It is not idle, therefore, to observe reflexively that in that very Thought, one has separated himself from them, and is no longer that which empirically he still sees himself to be. — William Ernest Hocking

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

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

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

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

She wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson ... " "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway - a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe - all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it. — Truman Capote

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

Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality. — William Ernest Hocking

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished. — William Ernest Hocking

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

I'd say Ernest Hemingway would be a blast to get drunk with. — William Beckett

And indeed, no man has found his religion until he has found that for which he must sell his goods and his life. — William Ernest Hocking

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

I visualized myself at Norma's house, stretched out on her couch, my eyes closed, and she at bthe paino playing a powerful movement from some Symphony in D major by Beethoven, by Brahms, by Sibelius, by Tschaikowsky, by anybody, by Thomas Wolfe, by Ernest Hemmingway, by William Saroyan, by Jack Kerouac, by George Apostolos, by Sebastian the Prince, by Love, by Earth, by Fire, by Water, by All, Everything, Love you and I, me myself, egotist, Earth, Fire, a mad and wild concoction of all Life, and of the all-embracing All. — Jack Kerouac

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

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

We are driven to confess that we actually care more for religion than we do for religious theories and ideas: and in merely making that distinction between religion and its doctrine-elements, have we not already relegated the latter to an external and subordinate position? Have we not asserted that "religion itself" has some other essence or constitution than mere idea or thought? — William Ernest Hocking

For those who have only to obey, law is what the sovereign commands. For the sovereign, in the throes of deciding what he ought to command, this view of law is singularly empty of light and leading. In the dispersed sovereignty of modern states, and especially in times of rapid social change, law must look to the future as well as to history and precedent, and to what is possible and right as well as to what is actual. — William Ernest Hocking

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

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

Wherever moral ambition exists, there right exists. And moral ambition itself must be presumed present in subconsciousness, even when the conscious self seems to reject it, so long as society has resources for bringing it into action; in much the same way that the life-saver presumes life to exist in the drowned man until he has exhausted his resources for recovering respiration. — William Ernest Hocking

Without good-will, no man has any presumptive right, except the right or opportunity to change his will, so long as there is hope of it. — William Ernest Hocking

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

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