W. H. Auden Quotes

In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we...

Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law o...

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is re...

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

As for Iago’s jealousy, one cannot believe that a seriously jealous man could behave towards his wif...

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet ...

After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, ...

A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish...

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

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a m...

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietz

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

Art is born of humiliation.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

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

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a m...

Choice of attention-to pay attention to this and ignore that-is to the inner life what choice of act...

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and...

It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is rightly more impo...

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

Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.

We are all here on earth to help others what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

Let us humour if we can The vertical man Though we value none But the horizontal one.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his ...

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his...

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed li...

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.

To make one, there must be two.

I have never, I think, wanted to 'belong' to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resen...

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

I write because I love to play with language.

We must love one another or die

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

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

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

What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced socie...

All I have is a voice.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I ...

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

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

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad tr...

Poetry makes nothing happen.

The enlightenment driven away,The habit-forming pain,Mismanagement and grief:We must suffer them all...

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sl...

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they s...

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

I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm...

We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of...

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

The More Loving OneLooking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to he...

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

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and ...

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The realit...

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

Say this city has ten million souls,Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:Yet there’...

In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greates...

The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesm...

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

Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficu...

And maps can really point to placesWhere life is evil now:Nanking. Dachau.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and ...

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of t...

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

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am fr...

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.

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

Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on po...

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) ...

Some thirty inches from my noseThe frontier of my Person goes,And all the untilled air betweenIs pri...

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

All we are not stares back at what we are.

A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrewsNot to be born is the best for manThe second be...

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the o...

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

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

Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule...

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their conscience...

The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.

The Ogre does what ogres can,Deeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach:The Og...

As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgme...

If you want romance, fuck a journalist.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever ho...

Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us...

In the nightmare of the darkAll the dogs of Europe bark,And the living nations wait,Each sequestered...

O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With...

My second thoughts condemnAnd wonder how I dareTo look you in the eye.What right have I to swearEven...

I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.

Evil is unspectacular and always human,And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....

He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight,...

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

Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes —...

What living occasion can,Be just to the absent?

Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may dri...

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

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but t...