W H Auden Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about W H Auden

W H Auden Quotes & Sayings

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If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try. — W. H. Auden

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

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse — W. H. Auden

Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible. — W. H. Auden

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. — W. H. Auden

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

Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling. — W. H. Auden

Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear. — W. H. Auden

If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being. — W. H. Auden

Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered. — W. H. Auden

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

As writing is one of the desperate professions, it has universal appeal, especially for those not engaged in it. — W. H. Auden

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

No being can make another one happy. — W. H. Auden

It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is, rightly, more important that he eat than that he philosophize. — W. H. Auden

The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen. — W. H. Auden

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ. — W. H. Auden

Music is the best means we have of digesting time. — W. H. Auden

What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts? — W. H. Auden

Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores. — W. H. Auden

Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead. — W. H. Auden

Criticism should be a casual conversation. — W. H. Auden

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

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. — W. H. Auden

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

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true. — W. H. Auden

All I have is a voice. — W. H. Auden

You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire. — W. H. Auden

Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral — W. H. Auden

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. — W. H. Auden

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle. — W. H. Auden

Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place; — W. H. Auden

To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith — W. H. Auden

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

The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten. — W. H. Auden

The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk. — W. H. Auden

Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious. — W. H. Auden

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

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. — W. H. Auden

Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts. — W. H. Auden

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. — W. H. Auden

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. — W. H. Auden

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

Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there. — W. H. Auden

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

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts. — W. H. Auden

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. — W. H. Auden

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. — W. H. Auden

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry. — W. H. Auden

Weep for the lives your wishes never led. — W. H. Auden

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

Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods. — W. H. Auden

All we are not stares back at what we are. — W. H. Auden

He still loves life
But O O O O how he wishes
The good Lord would take him. — W. H. Auden

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons. — W. H. Auden

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

Dance, dance, dance till you drop. — W. H. Auden

As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust. — W. H. Auden

In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or today. — W. H. Auden

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

Fate succombs many a species. One alone jeopardizes itself. — W. H. Auden

Human "nature" is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before. — W. H. Auden

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. — W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters. — W. H. Auden

Lust is less a physical need than a way of forgetting time and death. — W. H. Auden

Art is born of humiliation. — W. H. Auden

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

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun. — W. H. Auden

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

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. — W. H. Auden

I may want to sleep with Miss America, but I have no wish to hear her talk about herself and her family. — W. H. Auden

Thoughts on his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic. — W. H. Auden

Enormous novels by co-eds.
Rain down on our defenceless heads. Till our teeth chatter. — W. H. Auden

In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required. — W. H. Auden

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

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. — W. H. Auden

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality. — W. H. Auden

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. — W. H. Auden

Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense. — W. H. Auden

Oh dear white children, casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words. — W. H. Auden

The sky is darkening like a stain Something is going to fall like rain And it won't be flowers — W. H. Auden

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

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. — W. H. Auden

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people. — W. H. Auden

There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye. — W. H. Auden

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

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

Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself. - W. H. AUDEN, — Mitch Albom

Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places. — W. H. Auden

Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate. — W. H. Auden

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. — W. H. Auden

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation. — W. H. Auden

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters
Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop. — W. H. Auden

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? — W. H. Auden

Words are for those with promises to keep. — W. H. Auden

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

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in. — W. H. Auden

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

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. — W. H. Auden

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. — W. H. Auden