Top 100 W H Auden Quotes
#1. As W.H. Auden pointed out, the Reaper takes the rolling in money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung. But that isn't where Auden starts his list. He starts with the innocent young.
Stephen King
#2. I'm trying to create a collection of stories - the 'U.F.O.W.A.V.E.' songs are all stories. I haven't really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden's poems when I was younger, and the imagery really interested me.
King Krule
#3. A culture," the poet W. H. Auden observed, "is no better than its woods.
Chris Hedges
#4. I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. - W. H. AUDEN
John Le Carre
#5. I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.
J. Courtney Sullivan
#6. Were all stars to disappear and die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
- W. H. Auden, "The More Loving One
W. H. Auden
#7. The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
George Orwell
#8. The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead.
Michael Jackson
#9. 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. W. H. Auden
Gary L. Thomas
#10. Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself. - W. H. AUDEN,
Mitch Albom
#11. As English poet W.H. Auden put it in "Apropos of Many Things": "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.
Richard Rohr
#12. 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
#13. O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.
W. H. Auden
#14. 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.
W. H. Auden
#15. The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they've realised they can't get away with it.
W. H. Auden
#16. 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
#17. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
W. H. Auden
#18. 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.
W. H. Auden
#19. The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
W. H. Auden
#20. One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. Auden
#21. 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
#22. 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.
W. H. Auden
#23. Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
W. H. Auden
#24. 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.
W. H. Auden
#25. Lust is less a physical need than a way of forgetting time and death.
W. H. Auden
#26. Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.
W. H. Auden
#27. All we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. Auden
#28. About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
W. H. Auden
#29. It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
W. H. Auden
#30. Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.
W. H. Auden
#31. To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
W. H. Auden
#32. We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
W. H. Auden
#33. Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.
W. H. Auden
#34. The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.
W. H. Auden
#36. Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
W. H. Auden
#37. God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
W. H. Auden
#38. 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
#39. With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse
W. H. Auden
#40. Enormous novels by co-eds.
Rain down on our defenceless heads. Till our teeth chatter.
W. H. Auden
#41. Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
W. H. Auden
#42. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
W. H. Auden
#43. Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.
W. H. Auden
#44. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
W. H. Auden
#45. O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.
W. H. Auden
#46. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
W. H. Auden
#47. One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W. H. Auden
#48. Whoever the searchlights catch,
Whatever the loudspeakers blare,
We are not to despair.
W. H. Auden
#49. An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
W. H. Auden
#50. Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won't believe again in their own size.
W. H. Auden
#51. 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.
W. H. Auden
#52. Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.
W. H. Auden
#53. The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake;
W. H. Auden
#54. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. Auden
#55. Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life
W. H. Auden
#56. 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
#58. The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
W. H. Auden
#59. Knowledge may have its purposes,
but guessing is always
more fun than knowing.
W. H. Auden
#60. Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
W. H. Auden
#61. The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
W. H. Auden
#62. The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
W. H. Auden
#63. Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.
W. H. Auden
#64. Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say
W. H. Auden
#65. Words have no word for words that are not true.
W. H. Auden
#66. 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
#68. Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.
W. H. Auden
#69. The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.
W. H. Auden
#70. Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.
W. H. Auden
#71. What living occasion can,
Be just to the absent?
W. H. Auden
#72. I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women, preferably married ones.
W. H. Auden
#73. 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
#74. All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
W. H. Auden
#75. I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.
W. H. Auden
#76. The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
W. H. Auden
#77. A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
W. H. Auden
#78. Criticism should be a casual conversation.
W. H. Auden
#79. Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
W. H. Auden
#80. The child unlucky in his little State,
Some hearth where freedom is excluded,
A hive whose honey is fear and worry,
Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape
W. H. Auden
#81. Three quarters of these people know
Instinctively what ought to be
The nature of society
And how they'd live there if they could.
If it were easy to be good,
And cheap, and plain as evil, how,
We all would be its members now...
W. H. Auden
#82. Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
W. H. Auden
#83. A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
W. H. Auden
#84. When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
W. H. Auden
#85. You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
W. H. Auden
#86. All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: I refuse to be what I am.
W. H. Auden
#87. 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.
W. H. Auden
#88. A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. Auden
#89. 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.
W. H. Auden
#90. If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water.
W. H. Auden
#91. Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.
W. H. Auden
#92. 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
#93. A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.
W. H. Auden
#94. Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
W. H. Auden
#95. I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade
W. H. Auden
#96. When I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.
W. H. Auden
#97. Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place;
W. H. Auden
#98. The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.
W. H. Auden
#99. See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.
W. H. Auden
#100. Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
W. H. Auden
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