Skip to content

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

— A. E. Housman A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Another quote →

Topics

Youth

More quotes by A. E. Housman

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

My heart always warms to people who do not come to see me, especially Americans, to whom it seems to be more of an effort.

And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.

Last Poems (1922)

The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall.

His folly has not fellow
Beneath the blue of day
That gives to man or woman
His heart and soul away.

A Shropshire Lad (1896)

All A. E. Housman quotes →

You may also like

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

J. M. Barrie Peter Pan (1904)

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.

Euripides

The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind; “they will both fall into the ditch.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: A. E. Housman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.