W. H. Auden Quotes

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun.

Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

A shilling life will give you all the facts.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

There are three cardinal rules - don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.

The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

Sincerity is technique.

Art is born of humiliation.

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

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.

I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.

Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.

The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.

I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.

Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.

The trees encountered on a country stroll Reveal a lot about that country's soul ... A culture is no better than its woods.

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

The closest modern equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot.

It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.

Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.

The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.

Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; whatfrom the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.

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

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.

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.

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.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.