Top 435 Quotes & Sayings by W. H. Auden - Page 3

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.

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.

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.

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.

We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is beyond me.

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.

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.

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

Christ did not enchant men; He demanded that they believe in Him: except on one occasion, the Transfiguration. For a brief while, Peter, James, and John were permitted to see Him in His glory. For that brief while they had no need of faith. The vision vanished, and the memory of it did not prevent them from all forsaking Him when He was arrested, or Peter from denying that he had ever known Him.

The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.

All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: "I refuse to be what I am."

That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.

There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.

Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.

Why doesn't the United States take over the monarchy and unite with England? England does have important assets. Naturally the longer you wait, the more they will dwindle. At least you could use it for a summer resort instead of Maine.

It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."

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

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.

A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.

The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.

Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop.

Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

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

Drama is based on the Mistake.

The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.

Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.

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?

To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.

Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.

As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.

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.

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.

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.

A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.

We are all here on earth to help others.

To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.

If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.

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

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.

To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?

God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.

Water is the soul of the Earth.

All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.

The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.

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.

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.