W. H. Auden Quotes
-
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
-
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
-
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
-
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
-
All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: 'I refuse to be what I am.'
-
Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
-
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
-
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
-
Art is born of humiliation.
-
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.
-
The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish.
-
I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
-
Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.
-
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
-
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.