Top 350 W.H. Auden Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.”

— W.H. Auden

252. “We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.”

— W.H. Auden

253. “Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.”

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

255. “A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.”

— W.H. Auden

256. “Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one’s own.”

— W.H. Auden

257. “For time is inches And the heart’s changes, Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.”

— W.H. Auden

258. “Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.”

— W.H. Auden

259. “God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.”

— W.H. Auden

260. “The closest modern equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot.”

— W.H. Auden

261. “Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.”

— W.H. Auden

262. “Poetry is the only art people haven’t learned to consume like soup.”

— W.H. Auden

263. “Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.”

— W.H. Auden

264. “Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.”

— W.H. Auden

265. “It is nonsense to speak of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures. To a hungry man it is, rightly, more important that he eat than that he philosophize.”

— W.H. Auden

266. “But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer “writer” for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer “poetry” would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.”

— W.H. Auden

267. “If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.”

— W.H. Auden

268. “Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.”

— W.H. Auden

269. “It takes little talent to see what lies under one’s nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.”

— W.H. Auden

270. “No hero is mortal till he dies.”

— W.H. Auden

271. “Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.”

— W.H. Auden

272. “The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.”

— W.H. Auden

273. “Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.”

— W.H. Auden

274. “The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.”

— W.H. Auden

275. “Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won’t believe again in their own size.”

— W.H. Auden

276. “Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss.”

— W.H. Auden

277. “What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.”

— W.H. Auden

278. “One cannot review a bad book without showing off.”

— W.H. Auden

279. “Drama is based on the Mistake.”

— W.H. Auden

280. “In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don’t think that art that is alive can remain on the same level of interest throughout – and the same is true of life.”

— W.H. Auden

281. “Just as a good man forgets his deed the moment he has done it, a genuine writer forgets a work as soon as he has completed it and starts to think about the next one; if he thinks about his past work at all, he is more likely to remember its faults than its virtues. Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.”

— W.H. Auden

282. “The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself 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

283. “Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.”

— W.H. Auden

284. “History marches to the drum of a clear idea.”

— W.H. Auden

285. “Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”

— W.H. Auden

286. “What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?”

— W.H. Auden

287. “A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.”

— W.H. Auden

288. “No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.”

— W.H. Auden

289. “The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.”

— W.H. Auden

290. “One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.”

— W.H. Auden

291. “Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.”

— W.H. Auden

292. “Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”

— W.H. Auden

293. “What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?”

— W.H. Auden

294. “There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.”

— W.H. Auden

295. “All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.”

— W.H. Auden

296. “There is a difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crim consciously, for its own sake.”

— W.H. Auden

297. “A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.”

— W.H. Auden

298. “There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that, as a rule, a poet should read them.”

— W.H. Auden

299. “The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one’s own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.”

— W.H. Auden

300. “Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes – ah, there’s a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that’s genuinely good From one that’s base but merely has succeeded.”

— W.H. Auden