W. H. Auden Quotes

See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.

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.

Now is the age of anxiety.

Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.

Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.

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

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.

We must love one another or die

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

But he would have us most of all remember to be enthusiastic over the night. Not only for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer but also because it needs our love. For with sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow. They are exiles who long for a future that lies in our power.

August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.

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

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.

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.

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.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water, And the expensive ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.

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

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.

I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women, preferably married ones.

How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

We were put on this earth to make things.

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

Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

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

Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.

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

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

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?

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

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

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.

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

When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.

Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.

Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire; it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.

It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

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.

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

From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.

Words have no word for words that are not true.

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.

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.