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

A. E. Housman Education See all quotes by A. E. Housman →

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More by A. E. Housman

“Most men are rather stupid, and most of those who are not stupid are, consequently, rather vain.”

“A man who possesses common sense and the use of reason must not expect to learn from treatises or lectures on textual criticism anything that he could not, with leisure and industry, find out for himself. What the lectures and treatises can do for him is to save him time and trouble by presenting to him immediately considerations which would in any case occur to him sooner or later.”

“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 seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach. Houseman's test for great poetry.”

“The difference between an icicle and a red-hot poker is really much slighter than the difference between truth and falsehood or sense and nonsense; yet it is much more immediately noticeable and much more universally noticed, because the body is more sensitive than the mind.”

“Nature, not content with denying to Mr — the faculty of thought, has endowed him with the faculty of writing.”

“Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.”

Resonant Thoughts

"We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ”Yes, that’s the way it is, or at l…"

— John Steinbeck

Literature1902–1968

#writing

"To write good poems is the secret of brevity."

— Dejan Stojanovic

Literature1959

#writing

"To a supreme degree Roosevelt had five qualifications for statesmanship: courage; patience, and an infinitely subtle sense of timing; the capacity to see the very great in the very small, to relate th…"

— John Gunther

Journalism1901–1970

#love

"Unbelievably, there is still here one of my most favorite places—the home of Henry and Ruth Denison at the very top of the hill, at the end of a road going nowhere, hanging above a reservoir-lake surr…"

— Alan Watts

Philosophy1915–1973

#friendship