W. H. Auden
Full Name: Wystan Hugh Auden
Birthdate: February 21, 1907
Birthplace: York, North Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom
Date of Death: September 29, 1973
Occupation: Poet
Profile: Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1948 for
The Age of Anxiety.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden
Number of Quotes: 78
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he
has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
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.
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act
of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual
exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
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.
Art is born of humiliation.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend;
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.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves
with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the
outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
Happy Birthday, Johnny,
Live beyond your income,
Travel for enjoyment,
Follow your own nose.
Healing,
Papa would tell me, is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is
good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
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,
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.
In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be
unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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.
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself
doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and
will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him,
God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far,
may it not be that faith
is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and
on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
No hero is mortal till he dies.
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they
were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
Now is the age of anxiety.
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or
money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye,
on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
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.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.
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.
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
Last on Earth
