W. H. Auden Quotations

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

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

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.

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

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.

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.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.

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.

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.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

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.

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.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

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

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.

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

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

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

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.

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

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

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

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.

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.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

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

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

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

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

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.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.

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.

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

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

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?

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

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

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

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

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

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.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

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.

It's 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.

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.

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.

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

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

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.

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.

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.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

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

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it - not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.

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.

Sincerity is technique.

Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.

In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.

If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water.

If we apply the term revolution to what happened in North America between 1776 and 1829, it has a special meaning. Normally, the word describes the process by which man transforms himself from one kind of man, living in one kind of society, with one way of looking at the world, into another kind of man, another society, another conception of life.... The American case is different: it is not a question of the Old Man transforming himself into the New, but of the New Man becoming alive to the fact that he is new, that he has been transformed already without his having realized it.

Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance.

Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.

A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothingto increase it; what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?

There is no love; There are only the various envies, all of them sad.

There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality; without art, no notion of liberty.

Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.

Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

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.

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.

One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.

We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.

But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.

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.'

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.

The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

Words are for those with promises to keep.