Wilfred Owen quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Wilfred Owen on Wise Famous Quotes.

The dust that fell unnoted as a dew,
Wrapped the dead city's face like mummy-cloth

Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds,
But here the thing's best left at home with friends.

Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting, Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting.

Some say God caught them even before they fell.

I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?

As bronze may be much beautified by lying in the dark damp soil, so men who fade in dust of warfare fade fairer, and sorrow blooms their soul.

Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.

My subject is war, and the pity of war.

And in his eyes
The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,
In different skies.

Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling.

Children are not meant to be studied, but enjoyed. Only by studying to be pleased do we understand them.

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.

Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.

She is elegant rather than belle.

Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.

Be bullied, be outraged, be killed, but do not kill.

I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed.

These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.

My soul's a little grief, grappling your chest,
To climb your throat on sobs; easily chased
On other sighs and wiped by fresher winds.

If I have got to be a soldier, I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable.

There breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.

The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter.

No-man's land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

Dead men may envy living mites in cheese,
Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys,
And subdivide, and never come to death.

And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling

The old happiness is unreturning. Boy's griefs are not so grievous as youth's yearning. Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.

Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.

Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot

Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.

All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want.

Sleep mothered them; and left the twilight sad.

All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

Was it for this the clay grew tall? O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all?

Move him into the sun-
gently its touch awoke him once,

All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.

Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.

Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.

All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.

I tried to peg out soldierly,
no use!
One dies of war like any old disease.

He's lost his colour very far from here,
Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry

I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.

Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout
"I see your lights!" But ours had long died out.

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.

Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill.

For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping may something have been left,
Which must die now.

Walking abroad, one is the admiration of all little boys, and meets an approving glance from every eye of elderly.

All a poet can do today is warn.