W. h. auden quotes

The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women, preferably married ones.

The lights must never go out, The music must always play

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?

We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.

Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.

Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.

Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

Now is the age of anxiety.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.

What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.

Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it - not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

Water is the soul of the Earth.

All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: "I refuse to be what I am."

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!

To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.

Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.

We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is beyond me.

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them - the one, in fact, which is not a mask.

All I have is a voice.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Let all your thinks be thanks.

No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.

The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.

If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.

The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.

Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.

I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.

The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.

Why doesn't the United States take over the monarchy and unite with England? England does have important assets. Naturally the longer you wait, the more they will dwindle. At least you could use it for a summer resort instead of Maine.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going to smash; They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods. A culture is no better than its woods.

Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.

In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith

A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

Sincerity is technique.

To be free is often to be lonely.

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.

It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God - that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.

The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.

Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.

What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?

But once in a while the odd thing happens Once in a while the dream comes true And the whole pattern of life is altered Once in a while, the moon turns blue

To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.

As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Christ did not enchant men; He demanded that they believe in Him: except on one occasion, the Transfiguration. For a brief while, Peter, James, and John were permitted to see Him in His glory. For that brief while they had no need of faith. The vision vanished, and the memory of it did not prevent them from all forsaking Him when He was arrested, or Peter from denying that he had ever known Him.

It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

People always get what they want. But there is a price for everything. Failures are either those who do not know what they want or are not prepared to pay the price asked them. The price varies from individual to individual. Some get things at bargain-sale prices, others only at famine prices. But it is no use grumbling. Whatever price you are asked, you must pay.