W. H. Auden Life Quotations

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.

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.

We are all here on earth to help others.

Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself.

Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.

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.

A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.

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.

Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

Life is a picnic on a precipice.

An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.