W. H. Auden quotes and sayings on affection, belief, books, culture, character, criticism, death, earth, ego, fear, God, giving, happiness, history etc.
Wystan Hugh Auden was a British-American poet renowned for his technical adept and stylistic achievements. His poems covered subjects including social and political issues, religion, love and morals. In his popular collections such as ‘The Age of Anxiety’, ‘The Dyer's Hand’ and ‘The Orators’, contained significant works namely Funeral Blues, September 1, 1939, The Shield of Achilles, For the Time Being, Horae Canonicae and The Sea and the Mirror. Apart from his poetic work, he was also associated with creation of several musical collaboration and film scripts. Auden’s prose writing involved reviews on psychological, literary and religious subjects. Proclaimed by Joseph Brodsky as the greatest mind in the 20th century, much of Auden’s work became popular after his death. Throughout his literary career, he was constantly compared with the likes of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. His satirical and ironically clipped style of writing inspired many young poets such as Charles Madge, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. His poems and writing covered a broad spectrum of subjects. We have collected his most notable quotes and thoughts from his poems and writings. Let us go through some of the greatest quotes by this British poet.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
W. H. Auden
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
W. H. Auden
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
W. H. Auden
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. Auden
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
W. H. Auden
Art is born of humiliation.
W. H. Auden
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
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
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. Auden
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. Auden
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?
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.
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
W. H. Auden
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. Auden
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.
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.
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.
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
W. H. Auden
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
W. H. Auden
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
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
W. H. Auden
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. Auden
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
W. H. Auden
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.
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
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
