W. H. Auden famous quotes

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
-- W. H. Auden

#Love #Strength #Water

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

#Change #Growth #Religion

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
-- W. H. Auden

#Expression #Feelings #Might

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
-- W. H. Auden

#Art #Nature #Healing

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
-- W. H. Auden

#Unique #Men #Mirrors

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
-- W. H. Auden

#Music #Art #Philosophy

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
-- W. H. Auden

#Real #Book

Let all your thinks be thanks.
-- W. H. Auden

#Thinking #Thanks

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
-- W. H. Auden

#Addiction #Damnation #Sin

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
-- W. H. Auden

#Angel #Way #Fairytale

Water is the soul of the Earth.
-- W. H. Auden

#Water #Soul #Earth

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
-- W. H. Auden

#Book #Beer #Quality

Learn from your dreams what you lack.
-- W. H. Auden

#Dream

There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.
-- W. H. Auden

#Eye #Stories #More Than Meets The Eye

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
-- W. H. Auden

#Inspirational #Funny #Helping Others

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

#Love #Inspirational #Life

The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
-- W. H. Auden

#Prayer #Attention #Definitions

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

#Marriage #Interesting #Romance

There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.
-- W. H. Auden

#Children #Book #Adults

Now is the age of anxiety.
-- W. H. Auden

#Birthday #Anxiety #Age

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
-- W. H. Auden

#Christmas #Friday #Easter

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.
-- W. H. Auden

#Art #Believe #Simple

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
-- W. H. Auden

#Rain #Cake #Complaining

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
-- W. H. Auden

#Hell #Factories #Assembly

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
-- W. H. Auden

#Medicine #Medical #States

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
-- W. H. Auden

#Smell #Doe #Invisible

Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
-- W. H. Auden

#Respect #Civilization #Diversity

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
-- W. H. Auden

#Death #Men #Gmos

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
-- W. H. Auden

#Learning #Israel #Evil

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
-- W. H. Auden

#Art #Mean #Bread

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
-- W. H. Auden

#Travel #Artist #Difficult

To make one, there must be two.
-- W. H. Auden

#Marriage #Two

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
-- W. H. Auden

#Inspirational #Mind #Unconscious Mind

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

#Prayer #Unique #Class

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

#Stars #Passion #Return

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
-- W. H. Auden

#Games #Class #Action

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
-- W. H. Auden

#People #Feelings #Telling The Truth

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
-- W. H. Auden

#Love #Lasts #Enchantment

The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
-- W. H. Auden

#Heaven #Hell #Slogans

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.
-- W. H. Auden

#Love #Character #Mean

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
-- W. H. Auden

#Dog #Joy #Wags

No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
-- W. H. Auden

#Leadership #Joy #Great Leader

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
-- W. H. Auden

#History #Answers #Study

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

#Eye #Hands #Bored

In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start.
-- W. H. Auden

#Healing #Heart #Relaxation

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
-- W. H. Auden

#Evil #Tables #Bed

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

#Love #Valentines Day #Rivers

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
-- W. H. Auden

#Names

Art is born of humiliation.
-- W. H. Auden

#Art #Born #Humiliation

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

#Art #Money #Writing

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
-- W. H. Auden

#Death #War #Men

It is axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time; conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
-- W. H. Auden

#Thinking #Self #People

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.
-- W. H. Auden

#Art #Thinking #Feelings

What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
-- W. H. Auden

#Exercise #Answers #Should

If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.
-- W. H. Auden

#Trying #Want #Aging

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

#Success #Patience #Work

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

#Music #Art #Thinking

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
-- W. H. Auden

#Stewardship

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them -- the one, in fact, which is not a mask.
-- W. H. Auden

#Finding The One #People #Trying

We must love one another or die
-- W. H. Auden

#Love #Educational #Philosophy

In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.
-- W. H. Auden

#Life #Art #Beer

Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
-- W. H. Auden

#Children #Recipes #Neurosis

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop.
-- W. H. Auden

#Dance #Stars #Rafters

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.
-- W. H. Auden

#Art #Sleep #Men

Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
-- W. H. Auden

#Sensual #Desire #Wish

To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith
-- W. H. Auden

#Faith #Easy #Difficult

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
-- W. H. Auden

#Love #Death #Song

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
-- W. H. Auden

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

#Dancing #Grace #Should

Hunger allows no choice.
-- W. H. Auden

#Choices #Hunger

All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State and no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
-- W. H. Auden

#Being Happy #Lying #Men

The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.
-- W. H. Auden

#New Year #Years #People

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

#Children #Hero #History

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.
-- W. H. Auden

#Believe #Poetry #Sound

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
-- W. H. Auden

#Mother #Writing #Language

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
-- W. H. Auden

#Love #Inspirational #Dream

Sincerity is technique.
-- W. H. Auden

#Technique #Crafts #Sincerity

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
-- W. H. Auden

#Music #Beautiful #Simple

And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
-- W. H. Auden

#Heart #Bears #Forgotten

The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
-- W. H. Auden

#Gentleman #Acting #Actors

All I have is a voice.
-- W. H. Auden

#Voice

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 he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
-- W. H. Auden

#Eye #Writing #Men

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
-- W. H. Auden

#Book #Thank God #Alternatives

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.
-- W. H. Auden

#Discovery #Meaning Of Life #Recognition

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
-- W. H. Auden

#Book #Reviews #Showing Off

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
-- W. H. Auden

#Confusion #Confusing #Funny Basketball

The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.
-- W. H. Auden

#Love #Order #Mind

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

#Mistake #Science #Drawing

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

#Believe #Writing #Double Standard

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
-- W. H. Auden

#Love #Affection #Equal

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.
-- W. H. Auden

#Men #Choices #Attention

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.
-- W. H. Auden

#Life #Believe #Writing

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
-- W. H. Auden

#Poetic #Poet #Makers

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
-- W. H. Auden

#Differences #Taste #Irritated

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

#Art #Media #Political

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
-- W. H. Auden

#Funny #Music #People

See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.
-- W. H. Auden

#Philosophical #Listening #Asking

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
-- W. H. Auden

#Ambition #Men #Intelligent

Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
-- W. H. Auden

#Relationship #Goodness #Easier

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

#Love #Passion #Poetry