W. H. Auden Quotes

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

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

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.

Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

The sky is darkening like a stain Something is going to fall like rain And it won't be flowers

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

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.

An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

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

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

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

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

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.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.

Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.

We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.

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.

A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

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

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.

To be free is often to be lonely.

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts.

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

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

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.

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.

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

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.

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

Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad; when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.

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 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.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.

To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

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

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like. For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.

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

The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God - that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.