Top 50 Wilfred Owen Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

— Wilfred Owen

2. “My subject is war, and the pity of war.”

— Wilfred Owen

3. “I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.”

— Wilfred Owen

4. “All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.”

— Wilfred Owen

5. “I, too, saw God through mud.”

— Wilfred Owen

6. “Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.”

— Wilfred Owen

7. “I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet’s.”

— Wilfred Owen

8. “And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.”

— Wilfred Owen

9. “Was it for this the clay grew tall?”

— Wilfred Owen

10. “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory. The old lie: It is sweet and fitting that you should die for your country.”

— Wilfred Owen

11. “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.”

— Wilfred Owen

12. “I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears; and caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts; and buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts; and rusted every bayonet with His tears.”

— Wilfred Owen

13. “All a poet can do today is warn.”

— Wilfred Owen

14. “No-man’s land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.”

— Wilfred Owen

15. “Courage was mine, and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled.”

— Wilfred Owen

16. “Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.”

— Wilfred Owen

17. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”

— Wilfred Owen

18. “Was it for this the clay grew tall? O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth’s sleep at all?”

— Wilfred Owen

19. “Whatever mourns when many leave these shores: Whatever shares The eternal reciprocity of tears.”

— Wilfred Owen

20. “These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.”

— Wilfred Owen

21. “Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.”

— Wilfred Owen

22. “If I have to be a soldier I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable.”

— Wilfred Owen

23. “Sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland.”

— Wilfred Owen

24. “Some say God caught them even before they fell.”

— Wilfred Owen

25. “Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.”

— Wilfred Owen

26. “I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.”

— Wilfred Owen

27. “Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!”

— Wilfred Owen

28. “Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.”

— Wilfred Owen

29. “All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.”

— Wilfred Owen

30. “Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.”

— Wilfred Owen

31. “The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter.”

— Wilfred Owen

32. “Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.”

— Wilfred Owen

33. “The old happiness is unreturning. Boy’s griefs are not so grievous as youth’s yearning. Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.”

— Wilfred Owen

34. “Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill.”

— Wilfred Owen

35. “It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined.”

— Wilfred Owen

36. “I, too, saw God through mud – The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled. War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.”

— Wilfred Owen

37. “The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.”

— Wilfred Owen

38. “Sleep mothered them; and left the twilight sad.”

— Wilfred Owen

39. “All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want.”

— Wilfred Owen

40. “Children are not meant to be studied, but enjoyed. Only by studying to be pleased do we understand them.”

— Wilfred Owen

41. “Walking abroad, one is the admiration of all little boys, and meets an approving glance from every eye of elderly.”

— Wilfred Owen

42. “A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.”

— Wilfred Owen

43. “So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.”

— Wilfred Owen

44. “Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.”

— Wilfred Owen

45. “I don’t ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?”

— Wilfred Owen

46. “When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to-it leaves nothing.”

— Wilfred Owen

47. “After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.”

— Wilfred Owen

48. “As bronze may be much beautified by lying in the dark damp soil, so men who fade in dust of warfare fade fairer, and sorrow blooms their soul.”

— Wilfred Owen

49. “I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.”

— Wilfred Owen

50. “You would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory the old lie: Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori.”

— Wilfred Owen