W. H. Auden Quotes
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Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
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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.
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The thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away, Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay At what the god had wrought To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Who would not live long.
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If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
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Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
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History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
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Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain's lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress.
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Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
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To ask the hard question is simple, The simple act of the confused will.
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I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
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I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
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Learn from your dreams what you lack.
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All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: 'I refuse to be what I am.'
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Art is born of humiliation.
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The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish.
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Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
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Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
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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.
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Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.
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All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
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When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.