W.H. Auden Quotes

It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.

The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.

The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.

Long ago the accusations had begun, And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged

All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.

Like love we don't know where or why Like love we cant compel or fly Like Love we often weep Like Love we seldom keep

The sky is darkening like a stain Something is going to fall like rain And it won't be flowers

Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.

Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won't believe again in their own size.

Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams

There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.

The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake.

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.

All the literati keep An imaginary friend.

Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.

Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral

the child unlucky in his little State, Some hearth where freedom is excluded, A hive whose honey is fear and worry, Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade

Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.

Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.

The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.

For time is inches And the heart's changes, Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.

We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock

Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes i do not like my work On a pink official form.

If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts.

We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead, From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.

Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise

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

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

Small tyrants, threatened by big, sincerely believethey love liberty.

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.

The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.

I would destroy the entire village if doing so meant keeping you safe.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.

All we are not stares back at what we are.

To save your world, you asked this man to die:Would this man, could he see you now, asked why?

Those secrets residing in their hearts and minds held magnificent Energy. Humans were too inept to see it as anything but evil.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.