W. H. Auden Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

W. H. Auden
The detective must be either the official representative of the ethical or the exceptional individual who is in a state of grace.

W. H. Auden
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.

W. H. Auden
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water, And the expensive ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden
The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.

W. H. Auden
He suffers from one great literary defect, which is often found in lonely geniuses: he never knows when to stop. Lonely people are apt to fall in love with the sound of their own voice, as Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, not out of conceit but out of despair of finding another who will listen and respond.

W. H. Auden
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

W. H. Auden
'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed. 'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.'

W. H. Auden
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.

W. H. Auden
Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

W. H. Auden
The aim of education is to induce the largest amount of neurosis that the individual can bear without cracking.

W. H. Auden
Nobody knows what the cause is,
Though some pretend they do;
It's like some hidden assassin
Waiting to strike at you.

W. H. Auden
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire; Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.

W. H. Auden
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.

W. H. Auden
In a national capital Mirabeau and his set
Attacked mystery ; the packed galleries roared
And history marched to the drums of a clear idea,
The aim of the Rational City, quick to admire,
Quick to tire.

W. H. Auden
Pleasure is by no means an infallible guide, but it is the least fallible.

W. H. Auden
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

W. H. Auden
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

W. H. Auden
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

W. H. Auden
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to their graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.

W. H. Auden
The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing? But nobody says this. The self-appointed unqualified nurse says: "You are to sing the patient a song which will make him believe that I, and I alone, can cure him. If you can't or won't, I shall confiscate your passport and send you to the mines." And the poor patient in his delirium cries: "Please sing me a song which will give me sweet dreams instead of nightmares. If you succeed, I will give you a penthouse in New York or a ranch in Arizona."

W. H. Auden
Sir, no man's enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal.

W. H. Auden
A shilling life will give you all the facts.

W. H. Auden
I never write when I'm drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn't like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn't like slavish devotion — then she lies.

W. H. Auden
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. But it is unbecoming in an artist to talk about inspiration; that is the reader's business.

W. H. Auden
Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough; Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.

W. H. Auden
This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder,
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder.

W. H. Auden
Most people are even less original in their dreaming than in their waking life; their dreams are more monotonous than their thoughts and oddly enough, more literary.

W. H. Auden
Tomorrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs, The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion; Tomorrow the bicycle races Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But today the struggle.

W. H. Auden
A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

W. H. Auden