W.H. Auden Quotes

To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.

Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

The trees encountered on a country stroll Reveal a lot about that country's soul ... A culture is no better than its woods.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.

Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire; Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

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?

To make one, there must be two.

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

Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

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

Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

Love each other or perish.

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.

The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

There is no love; There are only the various envies, all of them sad.

Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.

Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.

There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.

One can only blaspheme if one believes.

Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.

I'm always amazed at the American practice of allowing one party to a homosexual act to remain passive--it's so undemocratic. Sexmust be mutual.

Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.

We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look: We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.

The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists

A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.

As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.

The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they've realised they can't get away with it.

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.

The closest modern equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot.

Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.

If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water.