W. H. Auden Quotes
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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
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He suffers from one great literary defect, which is often found in lonely geniuses: he never knows when to stop. Lonely people are apt to fall in love with the sound of their own voice, as Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, not out of conceit but out of despair of finding another who will listen and respond.
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The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
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A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, Loitered about that vacancy: a bird Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone: That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises were kept Or one could weep because another wept.
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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.
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All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.
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In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
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I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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All that we are not stares back at what we are.
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Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams
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We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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The trees encountered on a country stroll Reveal a lot about that country's soul ... A culture is no better than its woods.
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Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
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Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
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Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
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A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
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The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
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No hero is mortal till he dies.
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If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.
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Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.