W.H. Auden Quotes

August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?

Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.

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

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

Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself.

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

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

We who must die demand a miracle. How could the Eternal do a temporal act, The Infinite become a finite fact? Nothing can save us that is possible: We who must die demand a miracle.

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond.

Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think

Words are for those with promises to keep.

All pity is self-pity.

By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.

Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.

Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.

Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one

O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.

Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.

Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.

Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?

A shilling life will give you all the facts.

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse

Time will say nothing but I told you so.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

Does God judge us by appearances? I Suspect that He does.

Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.

There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.

There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow

There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance.

In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning... In life the loser's score is always zero.

It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.

When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.

Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.

Composing mortals with immortal fire.

From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.

An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.

The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.

Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead.

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.