A. E. Housman Thinking Quotations

Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.

To be a textual critic requires aptitude for thinking and willingness to think; and though it also requires other things, those things are supplements and cannot be substitutes. Knowledge is good, method is good, but one thing beyond all others is necessary; and that is to have a head, not a pumpkin, on your shoulders and brains, not pudding, in your head.

I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts. And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.

Think no more; 'tis only thinking / Lays lads underground.