Top 350 W.H. Auden Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 5 of 8

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

— W.H. Auden

202. “We were put on this earth to make things.”

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “All I have is a voice.”

— W.H. Auden

208. “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

209. “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

210. “Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm;.”

— W.H. Auden

211. “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

212. “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

213. “No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”

— W.H. Auden

214. “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

215. “Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond.”

— W.H. Auden

216. “Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.”

— W.H. Auden

217. “Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”

— W.H. Auden

218. “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

219. “A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.”

— W.H. Auden

220. “A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”

— W.H. Auden

221. “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

222. “Sincerity is technique.”

— W.H. Auden

223. “Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.”

— W.H. Auden

224. “The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.”

— W.H. Auden

225. “Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they’re glad to see you...”

— W.H. Auden

226. “The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.”

— W.H. Auden

227. “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

228. “Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: ‘As much neurosis as the child can bear.”

— W.H. Auden

229. “Learn from your dreams what you lack.”

— W.H. Auden

230. “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

231. “Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”

— W.H. Auden

232. “There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow.”

— W.H. Auden

233. “In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.”

— W.H. Auden

234. “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

235. “The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”

— W.H. Auden

236. “By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.”

— W.H. Auden

237. “The wolves will get you if the moths won’t.”

— W.H. Auden

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.”

— W.H. Auden

243. “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

244. “All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.”

— W.H. Auden

245. “No being can make another one happy.”

— W.H. Auden

246. “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

247. “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.”

— W.H. Auden

248. “A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.”

— W.H. Auden

249. “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

250. “Thoughts on his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic.”

— W.H. Auden