Top 350 W.H. Auden Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 8

101. “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

102. “Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.”

— W.H. Auden

103. “O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed.”

— W.H. Auden

104. “Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.”

— W.H. Auden

105. “There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.”

— W.H. Auden

106. “There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.”

— W.H. Auden

107. “The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.”

— W.H. Auden

108. “I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade.”

— W.H. Auden

109. “To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.”

— W.H. Auden

110. “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”

— W.H. Auden

111. “Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”

— W.H. Auden

112. “Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.”

— W.H. Auden

113. “As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.”

— W.H. Auden

114. “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

115. “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

116. “All pity is self-pity.”

— W.H. Auden

117. “All that we are not stares back at what we are.”

— W.H. Auden

118. “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”

— W.H. Auden

119. “God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.”

— W.H. Auden

120. “Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”

— W.H. Auden

121. “About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.”

— W.H. Auden

122. “To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself...”

— W.H. Auden

123. “As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption.”

— W.H. Auden

124. “Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.”

— W.H. Auden

125. “Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.”

— W.H. Auden

126. “The surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.”

— W.H. Auden

127. “Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.”

— W.H. Auden

128. “We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty’s conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock.”

— W.H. Auden

129. “There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.”

— W.H. Auden

130. “Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.”

— W.H. Auden

131. “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

132. “To choose what is difficult all one’s days, as if it were easy, that is faith.”

— W.H. Auden

133. “The sky is darkening like a stain Something is going to fall like rain And it won’t be flowers.”

— W.H. Auden

134. “Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams.”

— W.H. Auden

135. “All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.”

— W.H. Auden

136. “My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.”

— W.H. Auden

137. “Dance, dance, dance till you drop.”

— W.H. Auden

138. “To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.”

— W.H. Auden

139. “Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.”

— W.H. Auden

140. “Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.”

— W.H. Auden

141. “Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.”

— W.H. Auden

142. “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

143. “With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse.”

— W.H. Auden

144. “Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life.”

— W.H. Auden

145. “Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.”

— W.H. Auden

146. “Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.”

— W.H. Auden

147. “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”

— W.H. Auden

148. “Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.”

— W.H. Auden

149. “The lights must never go out, The music must always play.”

— W.H. Auden

150. “Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.”

— W.H. Auden