Top 350 W.H. Auden Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”

— W.H. Auden

202. “The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.”

— W.H. Auden

203. “Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”

— W.H. Auden

204. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

206. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

208. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

210. “The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.”

— W.H. Auden

211. “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

212. “All I have is a voice.”

— 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. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

222. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

224. “Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.”

— W.H. Auden

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “Sincerity is technique.”

— W.H. Auden

229. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

231. “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

232. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

234. “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

235. “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

236. “The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.”

— W.H. Auden

237. “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

238. “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

239. “Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.”

— W.H. Auden

240. “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

241. “The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.”

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

244. “Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.”

— W.H. Auden

245. “In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.”

— W.H. Auden

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

250. “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