There, by the starlit fences The wanderer halts and hears My soul that lingers sighing About the glimmering weirs.
A. E. HousmanRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses the struggle of an individual against the overwhelming challenges of life and the universe.
In this contemplative quote, A. E. Housman articulates the sentiment of feeling like an outsider in a complex world filled with difficulties and divine mysteries. It portrays the human experience of grappling with existence, highlighting feelings of fear and isolation as one confronts the inherent odds of life shaped by both human actions and higher powers, ultimately questioning the place of the individual within such a vast and unfathomable reality.
Themes
StruggleExistenceIsolationFearLife
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about resilience in the face of adversity.
More from A. E. Housman
All quotes →Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.
A. E. HousmanRead
I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
A. E. HousmanRead
Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.
A. E. HousmanRead
And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
A. E. HousmanRead
Oh, 'tis jesting, dancing, drinking_x000D_ _x000D_ Spins the heavy world around.
A. E. HousmanRead
Similar quotes
The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
Walter BagehotRead
A farmer's horse is never lame, never unfit to go. Never throws out curbs, never breaks down before or behind. Like his master he is never showy. He does not paw and prance, and arch his neck, and bid the world admire his beauties...and when he is wanted, he can always do his work.
Anthony TrollopeRead
The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty—it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
Mother TeresaRead
If atoms do, by chance, happen to combine themselves into so many shapes, why have they never combined together to form a house or a slipper? By the same token, why do we not believe that if innumerable letters of the Greek alphabet were poured all over the market-place they would eventually happen to form the text of the Iliad?
Michel De MontaigneRead
How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.
Kurt VonnegutRead
There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.
Leon KassRead