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Quotes by W. H. Auden


Learn from your dreams what you lack.
– W. H. Auden
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
– W. H. Auden
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
– W. H. Auden
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
– W. H. Auden
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
– W. H. Auden
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
– W. H. Auden
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
– W. H. Auden
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
– W. H. Auden
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
– 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
America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an Tlite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
– W. H. Auden
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
– W. H. Auden
Art is born of humiliation.
– W. H. Auden
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
– W. H. Auden
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
– W. H. Auden
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
– W. H. Auden
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
– W. H. Auden
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
– W. H. Auden
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
– W. H. Auden
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
– W. H. Auden
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
– W. H. Auden
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
– W. H. Auden
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
– W. H. Auden
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
– W. H. Auden
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say: Sanctity is the state about which theology has nothing to say.
– W. H. Auden
I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
– W. H. Auden
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
– W. H. Auden
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
– W. H. Auden
In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
– W. H. Auden
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
– W. H. Auden
It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
– W. H. Auden
It is... 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
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
– W. H. Auden
It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
– W. H. Auden
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
– W. H. Auden
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that ''faith'' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
– W. H. Auden
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
– W. H. Auden
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
– W. H. Auden
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
– W. H. Auden
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
– W. H. Auden
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
– W. H. Auden
No hero is mortal till he dies.
– W. H. Auden
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
– W. H. Auden
Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire; it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.
– W. H. Auden
Now is the age of anxiety.
– W. H. Auden
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
– W. H. Auden
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
– W. H. Auden
Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too ''personal'' style.
– W. H. Auden
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
– W. H. Auden
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
– W. H. Auden
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
– W. H. Auden
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
– W. H. Auden
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
– W. H. Auden
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
– W. H. Auden
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
– W. H. Auden
There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ''Did you get an erection?'' If the answer is ''Yes'' from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.
– W. H. Auden
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
– 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
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
– W. H. Auden
We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
– W. H. Auden
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
– 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 room full of dukes.
– W. H. Auden
You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.
– W. H. Auden
You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
– W. H. Auden
You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
– W. H. Auden
You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at.
– W. H. Auden
No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
– W. H. Auden
One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
– W. H. Auden
A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.
– 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
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
– W. H. Auden
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
– W. H. Auden
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
– W. H. Auden
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
– W. H. Auden
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
– W. H. Auden