W. H. Auden Quotes
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You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
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Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
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We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die.
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In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
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A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign.
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August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.
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To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
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Let us honour if we canThe vertical manThough we value noneBut the horizontal one.
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Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
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Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
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Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
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Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them - the one, in fact, which is not a mask.
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Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
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The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
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Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
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It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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In all technologically 'advanced' countries, fashion has replaced tradition, so that involuntary membership in a society can no longer provide a feeling of community.
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One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
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No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
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The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
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Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last; Nurses to their graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.
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When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
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'O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.'The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.'
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In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.