W.H. Auden

Quotes

• “Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowl...”
• “The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrewsNot to be born is the best for manThe second best is a formal order...”
• “In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, ...”
• “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 at the moment when h...”
• “Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part.They taught me to express...”
• “Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for...”
• “So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible,...”
• “The Ogre does what ogres can,Deeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach:The Ogre cannot master spe...”
• “Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseW...”
• “Some thirty inches from my noseThe frontier of my Person goes,And all the untilled air betweenIs private pagus or demesn...”
• “Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves...”
• “Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothi...”
• “I have never, I think, wanted to 'belong' to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resented exclusion. Why s...”
• “In the nightmare of the darkAll the dogs of Europe bark,And the living nations wait,Each sequestered in its hate;Intelle...”
• “To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interpr...”
• “Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it ...”
• “The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and wri...”
• “There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art...”
• “When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have ...”
• “No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and q...”
• “Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on hi...”
• “In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from...”
• “Say this city has ten million souls,Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:Yet there’s no place for us, m...”
• “The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharin...”
• “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 ...”
• “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our ...”
• “Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them mak...”
• “Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother a...”
• “Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.”
• “The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.”
• “We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of no account.”
• “Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.”
• “The enlightenment driven away,The habit-forming pain,Mismanagement and grief:We must suffer them all again.”
• “Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”
• “The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.”
• “To save your world, you asked this man to die:Would this man, could he see you now, asked why?”
• “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 ....”
• “The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.”
• “He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietz”
• “The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.”
• “Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts.”
• “no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.”
• “And maps can really point to placesWhere life is evil now:Nanking. Dachau.”
• “Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.”
• “The friends who met here and embraced are gone,Each to his own mistake;”
• “Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.”
• “Small tyrants, threatened by big,sincerely believethey love liberty.”
• “And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.”
• “In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.”