W. H. Auden Quotes
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Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
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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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All pity is self-pity.
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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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Every day America's destroyed and re-created,America is what you do,America is I and you,America is what you choose to make it.
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Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.
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The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.
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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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Let us then Consider rather the incessant Now of The traveler through time, his tired mind Biased towards bigness since his body must Exaggerate to exist, possessed by hope...
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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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Lay your sleeping head, my love Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral; But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie: Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful.
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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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A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign.
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Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
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One can only blaspheme if one believes.
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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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May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
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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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God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
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For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.
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Now is the age of anxiety.
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All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
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In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments.