Top 100 W. H. Auden Quotes
#1. Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
W. H. Auden
#2. I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.
W. H. Auden
#3. One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. Auden
#4. My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.
W. H. Auden
#5. Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
W. H. Auden
#6. How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.
W. H. Auden
#7. With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse
W. H. Auden
#8. Enormous novels by co-eds.
Rain down on our defenceless heads. Till our teeth chatter.
W. H. Auden
#9. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
W. H. Auden
#10. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. Auden
#11. Beloved, we are always in the wrong, Handling so clumsily our stupid lives, Suffering too little or too long, Too careful even in our selfish loves: The decorative manias we obey Die in grimaces round us every day, Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice Which utters an absurd command - Rejoice.
W. H. Auden
#12. Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say
W. H. Auden
#13. To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
W. H. Auden
#14. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
W. H. Auden
#15. Criticism should be a casual conversation.
W. H. Auden
#16. You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
W. H. Auden
#17. Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
And take short views.
W. H. Auden
#18. Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place;
W. H. Auden
#20. Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
W. H. Auden
#21. You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
W. H. Auden
#22. 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.
W. H. Auden
#23. Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.
W. H. Auden
#24. And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went
W. H. Auden
#25. Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
W. H. Auden
#26. Nature and Passion are powerful, but they are also full of grief. True happiness would have the calm and order of bourgeois routine without its utilitarian ignobility and boredom.
W. H. Auden
#27. One can only blaspheme if one believes.
W. H. Auden
#28. There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
W. H. Auden
#29. We were put on this earth to make things.
W. H. Auden
#30. 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.
W. H. Auden
#31. 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.
W. H. Auden
#32. I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone says: 'Whom do you write for?' I reply: 'Do you read me?' If they say 'Yes,' I say, 'Do you like it?' If they say 'No,' then I say, 'I don't write for you.'
W. H. Auden
#33. Long ago the accusations had begun,
And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged
W. H. Auden
#34. 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?
W. H. Auden
#35. Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
W. H. Auden
#36. Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
W. H. Auden
#37. In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.
W. H. Auden
#38. Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.
W. H. Auden
#39. No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden
#40. Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good
we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know
and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.
W. H. Auden
#41. Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.
W. H. Auden
#42. 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.
W. H. Auden
#43. 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.
W. H. Auden
#44. I write because I love to play with language.
W. H. Auden
#45. We have no destiny assigned us:
Nothing is certain but the body; we plan
To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us
Of the equality of man.
W. H. Auden
#46. A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
W. H. Auden
#47. There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, 'Did you get an erection?' If the answer is 'Yes' from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.
W. H. Auden
#49. There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.
W. H. Auden
#50. There was still gold and silver in the mountains,
And hunger was a more immediate sorrow
W. H. Auden
#51. The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
W. H. Auden
#52. Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
W. H. Auden
#53. Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
W. H. Auden
#54. But once in a while the odd thing happens
Once in a while the dream comes true
And the whole pattern of life is altered
Once in a while, the moon turns blue
W. H. Auden
#56. The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
W. H. Auden
#57. Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
W. H. Auden
#58. Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
W. H. Auden
#59. Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
W. H. Auden
#60. Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.
W. H. Auden
#61. Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
W. H. Auden
#62. We are, for all our polish, of little
stature, and, as human lives,
compared with authentic martyrs,
of no account.
W. H. Auden
#63. For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.
W. H. Auden
#64. these days of exotic splendour may stand out
in each lifetime like marble
mileposts in an alluvial land
W. H. Auden
#65. 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.
W. H. Auden
#66. If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
W. H. Auden
#67. In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start.
W. H. Auden
#68. We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
W. H. Auden
#70. no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
W. H. Auden
#71. It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
W. H. Auden
#72. He still loves life
But O O O O how he wishes
The good Lord would take him.
W. H. Auden
#73. It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is, rightly, more important that he eat than that he philosophize.
W. H. Auden
#74. The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
W. H. Auden
#75. The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing?
W. H. Auden
#76. The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
W. H. Auden
#77. Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.
W. H. Auden
#79. August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.
W. H. Auden
#80. All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state.
W. H. Auden
#81. Accurate scholarship can
unearth the whole offence
from luther untill noe
that has driven a culture mad.
From what occured at linz
what huge imago made
a psychopathic god.
i and the public know
what all schoolchildren learn
those to whom evil is done
do evil in return.
W. H. Auden
#82. I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
W. H. Auden
#83. The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
W. H. Auden
#84. Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.
W. H. Auden
#85. Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams
W. H. Auden
#86. Swans in the winter air
A white perfection have
W. H. Auden
#87. Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.
W. H. Auden
#88. Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!
W. H. Auden
#89. The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.
W. H. Auden
#90. I'm always amazed at the American practice of allowing one party to a homosexual act to remain passive
it's so undemocratic. Sexmust be mutual.
W. H. Auden
#91. 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.
W. H. Auden
#92. Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
W. H. Auden
#94. Fate succombs many a species. One alone jeopardizes itself.
W. H. Auden
#95. Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
W. H. Auden
#96. Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
W. H. Auden
#97. I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
W. H. Auden
#98. If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. Auden
#99. And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
W. H. Auden
#100. The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.
W. H. Auden
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