W. H. Auden Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

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

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
Long ago the accusations had begun,
And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged

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

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

W. H. Auden
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
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
We till shadowed days are done,
We must weep and sing
Duty's conscious wrong,
The Devil in the clock

W. H. Auden
In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or today.

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
Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.

W. H. Auden
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
Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.

W. H. Auden
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
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
To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.

W. H. Auden
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
Normally, when one passes someone on the street who is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With a photo there's no human decision; you're not there; you can't turn away; you simply gape. It's a form of voyeurism.

W. H. Auden
The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake;

W. H. Auden
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...

W. H. Auden
When Statesmen gravely say, We must be realistic,
The chances are they're weak and, therefore, pacifistic,
But when they speak of Principles, look out:: perhaps
Their generals are already poring over maps.

W. H. Auden
The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists. Unfortunately, poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons and are, therefore speechless.

W. H. Auden
The mystics themselves do not seem to have believed their physical and mental sufferings to be a sign of grace, but it is unfortunate that it is precisely physical manifestations which appeal most to the religiosity of the mob. A woman might spend twenty years nursing lepers without having any notice taken of her, but let her once exhibit the stigmata or live for long periods on nothing but the Host and water, and in no time the crowd will be clamoring for her beatification.

W. H. Auden
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.

W. H. Auden