This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
William Henley, fully William Ernest Henley
If I were king, my pipe should be premier. The skies of time and chance are seldom clear, We would inform them all with bland blue weather. Delight alone would need to shed a tear, For dream and deed should war no more together. Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear; Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather; And love, sweet love, should never fall to sere, If I were king. But politics should find no harbour near; The Philistine should fear to slip his tether; Tobacco should be duty free, and beer; In fact, in room of this, the age of leather, An age of gold all radiant should appear, If I were king.
Books | Death | Evil | Good | Inevitable | Influence | Light | Man | Temper | Time | Wavering | Old |
They lived unknown, till persecution dragged them into fame, and chased them up to heaven. Their ashes flew no marble tells us whither. With their names no bard embalms and sanctifies his song: and history, so warm on meaner things, is cold on this.
Truth |
When scandal has new-minted an old lie, or tax'd invention for a fresh supply, 'tis call'd a satire, and the world appears gathering around it with erected ears; a thousand names are toss'd into the crowd, some whisper'd softly, and some twang'd aloud, just as the sapience of an author's brain, suggests it safe or dangerous to be plain.
And then he drew a dial from his poke, And looking on it with lack-lustre eye, Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock. Thus we may see,' quoth he, 'how the world wags. 'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more 'twill be eleven; And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.' As You Like It. Act ii. Sc. 7.
And teach me how to name the bigger light, and how the less that burn by day and night.
But virtue, as it never will be moved, though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, so lust, though to a radiant angel linked, will sate itself in a celestial bed and prey on garbage. Two Gentlemen from Verona, Act ii, Scene 7
Do not honor him so much to prick thy finger, though to wound his heart. What valor were it, when a cur doth grin, for one to thrust his hand between his teeth when he might spurn him with his foot away? Henry VI, Act i, Scene 4