Wilfred Owen Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

Wilfred Owen
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

Wilfred Owen
This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
'My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

Wilfred Owen
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

Wilfred Owen
After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.

Wilfred Owen
I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's

Wilfred Owen
Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.

Wilfred Owen
I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?

Wilfred Owen
These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

Wilfred Owen
Children are not meant to be studied, but enjoyed. Only by studying to be pleased do we understand them.

Wilfred Owen
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead. But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Wilfred Owen
Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot

Wilfred Owen
I, too, saw God through mud - The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled. War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

Wilfred Owen
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen
I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law

Wilfred Owen
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
'My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.'

Wilfred Owen
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Wilfred Owen
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen
I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.

Wilfred Owen
Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.

Wilfred Owen
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, —
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

Wilfred Owen
The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned:
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.

Wilfred Owen
Walking abroad, one is the admiration of all little boys, and meets an approving glance from every eye of elderly.

Wilfred Owen
All a poet can do to-day is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

Wilfred Owen
We sent him down at last, out of the way.
Unwounded; — stout lad, too, before that strafe.
Malingering? Stretcher-bearers winked, 'Not half!' Next day I heard the Doc.'s well-whiskied laugh:
'That scum you sent last night soon died. Hooray!'

Wilfred Owen