Words matter. These are the best W. H. Auden Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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.
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
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.
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
It takes little talent to see what lies under one’s nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
‘Healing,’ Papa would tell me, ‘is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.’
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that ‘faith’ is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
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.
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
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.
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
No hero is mortal till he dies.
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
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.
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you’re good at.
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that ‘faith’ is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
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.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
I don’t get acting jobs because of my looks.
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.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
