W. H. Auden quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from W. H. Auden on Wise Famous Quotes.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

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

Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.

History marches to the drum of a clear idea.

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

A shilling life will give you all the facts.

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

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

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

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

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

One can only blaspheme if one believes.

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

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

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?

Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

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

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say

And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

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.

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.

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

We were put on this earth to make things.

The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

Let all your thinks be thanks.

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

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.

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

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

Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life

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

these days of exotic splendour may stand out
in each lifetime like marble
mileposts in an alluvial land

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

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

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

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

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last, Nurses to their graves are gone, But the prams go rolling on.

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

See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.

Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.

To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.

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

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

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

Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.

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

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

We must love one another or die

I write because I love to play with language.

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

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

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

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

All we are not stares back at what we are.

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.

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.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

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

Words have no word for words that are not true.

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

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

Lust is less a physical need than a way of forgetting time and death.

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.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

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

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

Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.

Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.

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.

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

Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.

Swans in the winter air
A white perfection have

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.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

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

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

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

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

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

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

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

The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.

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?

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

Time will say nothing but I told you so ...