Top 350 W.H. Auden Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.”

— W.H. Auden

152. “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

153. “The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.”

— W.H. Auden

154. “The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.”

— W.H. Auden

155. “Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.”

— W.H. Auden

156. “And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.”

— W.H. Auden

157. “The world needs a wash and a week’s rest.”

— W.H. Auden

158. “The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others; Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.”

— W.H. Auden

159. “The stars are dead. The animals will not look: We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.”

— W.H. Auden

160. “Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral.”

— W.H. Auden

161. “Like love we don’t know where or why Like love we cant compel or fly Like Love we often weep Like Love we seldom keep.”

— W.H. Auden

162. “Caesar’s double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes i do not like my work On a pink official form.”

— W.H. Auden

163. “Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them – the one, in fact, which is not a mask.”

— W.H. Auden

164. “Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.”

— W.H. Auden

165. “Words are for those with promises to keep.”

— W.H. Auden

166. “The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.”

— W.H. Auden

167. “Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.”

— W.H. Auden

168. “No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.”

— W.H. Auden

169. “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

170. “Criticism should be a casual conversation.”

— W.H. Auden

171. “In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one’s living so as not to be a parasite and loving one’s neighbor.”

— W.H. Auden

172. “To make one, there must be two.”

— W.H. Auden

173. “Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.”

— W.H. Auden

174. “Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.”

— W.H. Auden

175. “To ask the hard question is simple.”

— W.H. Auden

176. “If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I’d pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.”

— W.H. Auden

177. “A poet’s hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.”

— W.H. Auden

178. “Here am I, Here are you: but what does it mean? What are we going to do?”

— W.H. Auden

179. “To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?”

— W.H. Auden

180. “All time spent reading is time well-spent.”

— W.H. Auden

181. “For the error bred in the bone of each woman and each man craves what it cannot have, not universal love but to be loved alone.”

— W.H. Auden

182. “A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going to smash; They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods. A culture is no better than its woods.”

— W.H. Auden

183. “O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.”

— W.H. Auden

184. “Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.”

— W.H. Auden

185. “Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.”

— W.H. Auden

186. “Lust is less a physical need than a way of forgetting time and death.”

— W.H. Auden

187. “I don’t think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.”

— W.H. Auden

188. “All the literati keep An imaginary friend.”

— W.H. Auden

189. “If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.”

— W.H. Auden

190. “Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.”

— W.H. Auden

191. “Hunger allows no choice.”

— W.H. Auden

192. “Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.”

— W.H. Auden

193. “Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”

— W.H. Auden

194. “Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.”

— W.H. Auden

195. “Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.”

— W.H. Auden

196. “Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?”

— W.H. Auden

197. “A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothingto increase it; what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?”

— W.H. Auden

198. “Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.”

— W.H. Auden

199. “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

200. “Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.”

— W.H. Auden