W. H. Auden - Life Quotes

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Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.

W. H. Auden
Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

W. H. Auden
I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.

W. H. Auden
To the man-in-the street, who, I'm sorry to say
Is a keen observer of life,
The word intellectual suggests right away
A man who's untrue to his wife.

W. H. Auden
And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river." And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge, "Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. Descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."

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

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
Though the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.

W. H. Auden
To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say,
Is a keen observer of life,
The word 'Intellectual' suggests straight away
A man who's untrue to his wife.

W. H. Auden
Put the car away; when life fails
What's the good of going to Wales?
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?

W. H. Auden
They never forgot
That even the most dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

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

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
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