Create Yours

Top 350 W.H. Auden Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 8

W.H. Auden Quote: “A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover’s kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one’s neck.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Thoughts on his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “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 Quote: “All I have is a voice.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women, preferably married ones.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone says: ‘Whom do you write for?’ I reply: ‘Do you read me?’ If they say ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘Do you like it?’ If they say ‘No,’ then I say, ‘I don’t write for you.’”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm;.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they’re glad to see you...”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “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 Quote: “Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “We cannot be deaf to the question: ‘Do I love this world so well that I have to know how it ends?”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Sincerity is technique.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad; when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: ‘As much neurosis as the child can bear.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “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 Quote: “A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however “good” I may become, remains unchanged.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Learn from your dreams what you lack.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.”
W.H. Auden Quote: “I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn’t a word that wasn’t essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.”
PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 NEXT
Study Quotes
Growth Quotes
Helping Others Quotes
Intelligent Quotes
Ambition Quotes
Firsts Quotes
History Quotes
Quotes About Stories
Romance Quotes
Country Quotes
Fate Quotes
Motivational Quotes

Beautiful Wallpapers and Images

We hope you enjoyed our collection of 350 W.H. Auden Quotes.

All the images on this page were created with QuoteFancy Studio.

Use QuoteFancy Studio to create high-quality images for your desktop backgrounds, blog posts, presentations, social media, videos, posters, and more.

Learn more