Top 350 W.H. Auden Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.”

— W.H. Auden

252. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

254. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

256. “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

257. “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

258. “Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.”

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

261. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

263. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

265. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

271. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.”

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

281. “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

282. “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

283. “Drama is based on the Mistake.”

— W.H. Auden

284. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

286. “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

287. “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

288. “How happy is 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. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.”

— W.H. Auden

289. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

291. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

293. “Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other’s good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.”

— W.H. Auden

294. “Weep for the lives your wishes never led.”

— W.H. Auden

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.”

— W.H. Auden

300. “There are three cardinal rules – don’t take somebody else’s boyfriend unless you’ve been specifically invited to do so, don’t take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.”

— W.H. Auden