Top 350 W.H. Auden Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.”

— W.H. Auden

Featured in: Intelligent Quotes, Ambition Quotes

2. “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”

— W.H. Auden

3. “There’s always another story. There’s more than meets the eye.”

— W.H. Auden

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

4. “Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say.”

— W.H. Auden

5. “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.”

— W.H. Auden

6. “Love each other or perish.”

— W.H. Auden

Featured in: Helping Others Quotes

7. “Time will say nothing but I told you so...”

— W.H. Auden

8. “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

— W.H. Auden

Featured in: Growth Quotes

9. “I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.”

— W.H. Auden

10. “We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is beyond me.”

— W.H. Auden

Featured in: Helping Others Quotes

11. “We must love one another or die.”

— W.H. Auden

12. “How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.”

— W.H. Auden

13. “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.”

— W.H. Auden

14. “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

— W.H. Auden

15. “Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one.”

— W.H. Auden

16. “Now is the age of anxiety.”

— W.H. Auden

17. “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

18. “Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself.”

— W.H. Auden

Featured in: Fate Quotes

19. “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”

— W.H. Auden

20. “No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.”

— W.H. Auden

21. “You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.”

— W.H. Auden

22. “Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.”

— W.H. Auden

23. “History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”

— W.H. Auden

Featured in: Study Quotes, History Quotes

24. “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

25. “Let all your thinks be thanks.”

— W.H. Auden

26. “Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, Dance, Dance ’till you drop.”

— W.H. Auden

27. “Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.”

— W.H. Auden

28. “Water is the soul of the Earth.”

— W.H. Auden

29. “Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

— W.H. Auden

30. “To be free is often to be lonely.”

— W.H. Auden

31. “But once in a while the odd thing happens Once in a while the dream comes true And the whole pattern of life is altered Once in a while, the moon turns blue.”

— W.H. Auden

32. “All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”

— W.H. Auden

33. “A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”

— W.H. Auden

34. “You owe it to all of us all get on with what you’re good at.”

— W.H. Auden

35. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

37. “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

38. “I’ll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.”

— W.H. Auden

39. “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”

— W.H. Auden

40. “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.”

— W.H. Auden

41. “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.”

— W.H. Auden

42. “Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse’s flowers will not last, Nurses to their graves are gone, But the prams go rolling on.”

— W.H. Auden

43. “I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.”

— W.H. Auden

44. “In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start.”

— W.H. Auden

45. “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

— W.H. Auden

46. “Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think.”

— W.H. Auden

47. “Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.”

— W.H. Auden

48. “Life is a picnic on a precipice.”

— W.H. Auden

49. “The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.”

— W.H. Auden

50. “Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.”

— W.H. Auden