W. H. Auden Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.

W. H. Auden
In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.

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
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.

W. H. Auden
Long ago the accusations had begun,
And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged

W. H. Auden
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.

W. H. Auden
A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.

W. H. Auden
Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes i do not like my work
On a pink official form.

W. H. Auden
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.

W. H. Auden
You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.

W. H. Auden
Few can remember
clearly when innocence came
to a sudden end,
the moment at which we ask
for the first time: Am I loved?

W. H. Auden
There was still gold and silver in the mountains,
And hunger was a more immediate sorrow

W. H. Auden
For time is inches
And the heart's changes,
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.

W. H. Auden
America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.

W. H. Auden
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance.

W. H. Auden
What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?

W. H. Auden
The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.

W. H. Auden
My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

W. H. Auden
It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject.

W. H. Auden
See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.

W. H. Auden
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

W. H. Auden
The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.

W. H. Auden
The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

W. H. Auden
God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

W. H. Auden