W. H. Auden Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.

W. H. Auden
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.

W. H. Auden
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.

W. H. Auden
We are all here on Earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

W. H. Auden
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

W. H. Auden
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

W. H. Auden
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.

W. H. Auden
Earth, receive an honored guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

W. H. Auden
O what is that sound which so thrills the ear
Down in the valley drumming, drumming?
Only the scarlet soldiers, dear,
The soldiers coming.

W. H. Auden
Let us honour if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

W. H. Auden
To the man-in-the street, who, I'm sorry to say
Is a keen observer of life,
The word intellectual suggests right away
A man who's untrue to his wife.

W. H. Auden
Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams

W. H. Auden
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

W. H. Auden
There are some poets, Kipling for example, whose relation to language reminds one of a drill sergeant: the words are taught to wash behind their ears, stand properly at attention and execute complicated maneuvers, but at the cost of never being allowed to think for themselves.

W. H. Auden
Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.

W. H. Auden
The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.

W. H. Auden
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish.

W. H. Auden
The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

W. H. Auden
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.

W. H. Auden
A small grove massacred to the last ash,
An oak with heart-rot, give away the show:
This great society is going to smash;
They cannot fool us with how fast they go,
How much they cost each other and the gods.
A culture is no better than its woods.

W. H. Auden
Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

W. H. Auden
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

W. H. Auden
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

W. H. Auden
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

W. H. Auden
To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but to-day the struggle.

W. H. Auden