W. H. Auden Quotes

294 Sourced Quotes

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
'The unacknowledged legislators of the world' describe the secret police, not the poets.

W. H. Auden
It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.

W. H. Auden
When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.

W. H. Auden
Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.

W. H. Auden
Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
In which a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.

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
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed...

W. H. Auden
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.

W. H. Auden
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

W. H. Auden
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
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
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
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
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
To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.

W. H. Auden
An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.

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

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

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

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

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
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
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