W. H. Auden Quotes

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

W. H. Auden

• Sin
• Paradise
• Return

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.

  

  A. Scott Berg
  • Time
  • Great
  • School

• Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

  

  Samuel Butler
  • Work
  • Men
  • Sin

• I was informed... that some... were dreaming and wished to return.

  

  Zebulon Pike
  • Return
  • Dreaming
  • Informed

• I had the taste of the alcohol since I was 11. It allowed me to be clever, charming and to behave outrageously. Acting also allowed me not to be me. So I could indulge every fantasy in this paradise of America.

  

  Malachy McCourt
  • America
  • Clever
  • Alcohol

• Soon after, I returned home to my family, with a determination to bring them as soon as possible to live in Kentucky, which I esteemed a second paradise, at the risk of my life and fortune.

  

  Daniel Boone
  • Life
  • Live
  • Family

• It's successful, middle-class Arab men and women, professionals with seemingly happy family lives, who are prepared to go to paradise for a greater cause. That's terrifying.

  

  Damian Lewis
  • Men
  • Women
  • Family

• To have prevented one single sin is reward enough for the labors and efforts of a whole lifetime.

  

  Saint Ignatius
  • Single
  • Sin
  • Reward

• An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.

  

  Iain Sinclair
  • Doubt
  • Without
  • Return

• We've gone too far in thinking we can re-create an American democratic paradise in the Middle East.

  

  Rand Paul
  • Thinking
  • American
  • Paradise

• Israel's days without Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip are gone and will not return.

  

  Yitzhak Shamir
  • Israel
  • Return
  • Days

• The myths have always condemned those who 'looked back.' Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision.

  

  Dag Hammarskjold
  • May
  • Decision
  • Leaving

• There is no question that what we are seeing - the horrible advance of ISIS - goes back, if you will, to the original sin of the invasion of Iraq.

  

  Valerie Plame
  • Question
  • Sin
  • Seeing

• I don't plan to return. I have a lot of unresolved things to do.

  

  Eduard Shevardnadze
  • Things
  • Plan
  • Return

• What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Lost
  • Paradise

• Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.

  

  Yevgeny Zamyatin
  • Freedom
  • Paradise

• Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

  

  Paulo Coelho
  • Paradise

• I found out there is a production paradise in Brazil. I was able to make my second collection for less money but without sacrificing quality. More importantly, manufacturing in Brazil also fits in with my global initiative: to provide work and empowerment in a third-world country.

  

  Antonio Brown
  • World
  • Work
  • Country

• In about 1975-76, I lived with a woman in a little hut with some fruit trees, and I had some of the most extraordinary, happy times of my life. Apart from the horrendous Queensland police, who were corrupt and venal, it really was like living in paradise.

  

  Peter Carey
  • Life
  • Happy
  • Police

• Spirit is not a mystic concept. The spirit of a person is manifest in her aliveness, brightness of his eyes, in the resonance of her voice and in the ease and gracefulness of his movements. These qualities are related to and stem from a high level of energy in the body... Sensing the harmony between the internal pulsation of our body and that in the universe, we feel identified with the universal, with God. We are like tuning forks vibrating at the same pitch.

  

  Alexander Lowen
  • God
  • High
  • Energy

• When you come to Parliament on your first day, you wonder how you ever got here. After that, you wonder how the other 263 members got here.

  

  John G. Diefenbaker
  • Wonder
  • Firsts
  • Here

• I want the kind of career where I can move back and forth.

  

  Nathan Lane
  • Career
  • Want
  • Kind

• About a month ago, he didn't come to school and we had subs, and we were all wondering what was going on. We tried asking the school and they wouldn't tell us any information.

  

  Ashley Smith
  • School
  • Information
  • Subs

• For what my generation did and went through and so forth, and what these glamour boys earn for what little they play, it's a joke. Is it football? Are you guys football players? Is that what they call football? It's not iron-man football, where you stay on the field for 60 minutes. Everybody! We were iron men. Not a bunch of pussyfoots.

  

  Chuck Bednarik
  • Football
  • Player
  • Generation

• Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

  

  W. H. Auden
  • Sin
  • Paradise
  • Return