Top 350 W.H. Auden Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “It’s frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.”

— W.H. Auden

302. “The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.”

— W.H. Auden

303. “Long ago the accusations had begun, And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged.”

— W.H. Auden

304. “To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.”

— W.H. Auden

305. “People always get what they want. But there is a price for everything. Failures are either those who do not know what they want or are not prepared to pay the price asked them. The price varies from individual to individual. Some get things at bargain-sale prices, others only at famine prices. But it is no use grumbling. Whatever price you are asked, you must pay.”

— W.H. Auden

306. “You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.”

— W.H. Auden

307. “Composing mortals with immortal fire.”

— W.H. Auden

308. “One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.”

— W.H. Auden

309. “Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.”

— W.H. Auden

310. “May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that ‘faith’ is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?”

— W.H. Auden

311. “When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can’t help wishing the iconoclasts had won.”

— W.H. Auden

312. “Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.”

— W.H. Auden

313. “A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.”

— W.H. Auden

314. “I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.”

— W.H. Auden

315. “To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.”

— W.H. Auden

316. “A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.”

— W.H. Auden

317. “Any society is in danger of dismissing the virtue of another society because of its vices, and a democracy is always in danger of not paying enough attention to manners and forms.”

— W.H. Auden

318. “I write because I love to play with language.”

— W.H. Auden

319. “Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.”

— W.H. Auden

320. “Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!”

— W.H. Auden

321. “The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.”

— W.H. Auden

322. “Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.”

— W.H. Auden

323. “We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.”

— W.H. Auden

324. “What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one’s gifts?”

— W.H. Auden

325. “The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.”

— W.H. Auden

326. “It’s usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.”

— W.H. Auden

327. “That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.”

— W.H. Auden

328. “The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.”

— W.H. Auden

329. “From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.”

— W.H. Auden

330. “One can only blaspheme if one believes.”

— W.H. Auden

331. “Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.”

— W.H. Auden

332. “It is time for the destruction of error.”

— W.H. Auden

333. “If people marry on the assumption that love must always overcome obstacles, they will either become unfaithful or they will make things difficult. The better you know someone, the better you can torture him: man and wife become each other’s devils.”

— W.H. Auden

334. “Dance, dance, dance till you drop.”

— W.H. Auden

335. “Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.”

— W.H. Auden

336. “What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”

— W.H. Auden

337. “With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse.”

— W.H. Auden

338. “Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.”

— W.H. Auden

339. “Here am I, Here are you: but what does it mean? What are we going to do?”

— W.H. Auden

340. “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

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.”

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

349. “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

350. “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