W. H. Auden Quotes

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.

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

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

Like love we don't know where or why Like love we cant compel or fly Like Love we often weep Like Love we seldom keep

The stars are dead. The animals will not look: We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

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

Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.

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

Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.

Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.

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

There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.

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

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.

There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.

Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods.

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

So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.

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

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.

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

It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is, rightly, more important that he eat than that he philosophize.

Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one

Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.

Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.

It has been said that a poem should not mean but be. This is not quite accurate. In a poem, as distinct from many other kinds of verbal societies, meaning and being are identical. A poem might be called a pseudo-person. Like a person, it is unique and addresses the reader personally. On the other hand, like a natural being and unlike a historical person, it cannot lie.

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

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams

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.

Life is a picnic on a precipice.

Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss

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.'

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

Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.

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