A. E. Housman Quotes & Sayings

“Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.”

“Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”

“The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.”

“I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.”

“Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.”

“That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.”

“Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.”

“The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.”

“Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think.”

“Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.”