Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden Quotes
294 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
Of Sigmund Freud:
If often he was wrong and at times absurd
To us he is no more a person
Now but a climate of opinion.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that, as a rule, a poet should read them.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
The child unlucky in his little State,
Some hearth where freedom is excluded,
A hive whose honey is fear and worry,
Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
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.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or today.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
We till shadowed days are done,
We must weep and sing
Duty's conscious wrong,
The Devil in the clock
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.
W. H. Auden
Source
Report...
Long ago the accusations had begun,
And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged
W. H. Auden
1
...
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
W. H. Auden
Creative Commons
Born:
February 21, 1907
Died:
September 29, 1973
(aged 66)
Bio:
Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet noted for his vast poetic work in many forms on many themes.
Known for:
Funeral Blues
Poems
Musée des Beaux Arts
The Unknown Citizen
The Age of Anxiety
Most used words:
man
love
people
time
human
poetry
poet
art
life
law
day
find
heart
dead
lie
W. H. Auden on Wikipedia
W. H. Auden works on Wikisource
Suggest an edit or a new quote
W. H. Auden Quotes
W. H. Auden Short Quotes
Quotes about W. H. Auden
American Poet Quotes
Poet Quotes
20th-century Poet Quotes
Related People
William Butler Yeats
Irish Playwright
T. S. Eliot
English Author
Christopher Isherwood
English Novelist
Benjamin Britten
English Conductor
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes