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W. H. Auden [1907-1973] English

Rank: 4
Poet (with poems)

Auden Group, Christian, Formalism, Homoerotism, Modernism

Wystan Hugh Auden was an English poet, who later became an American citizen. He is best known for love poems such as "Funeral Blues," poems on political and social themes such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles," poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae."

Poetry, Art, Time, Death, Faith, Love, Music, Sad, Science, Age, Dreams, Food, Forgiveness, Funny, God, Happiness, Marriage, Money, Nature, Relationship, Society, Strength, Teacher, Travel, Valentine's Day

Quote	Tags	Rank
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.	Funny	101
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.	Love, Strength	102
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.	Death	103
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.	God	104
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.	Marriage, Time	105
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.		106
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.	Art, Food	107
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?		108
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.		109
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.		110
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.		111
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.	Time	112
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.	Age, Money, Society	113
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.		114
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.	Valentine's Day	115
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.		116
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.	Love	117
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.	Happiness	118
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.		119
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.	Teacher	120
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.	Relationship	121
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.		122
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.		123
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.	Music	124
Art is born of humiliation.	Art	125
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.		126
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'	Art, Nature, Science	201
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.		202
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.	Faith	203
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.	Poetry	204
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.		205
Learn from your dreams what you lack.	Dreams	206
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.		207
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.		208
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.		209
It's 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.	Sad	210
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.		211
You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.		212
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.		213
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.		214
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.	Poetry	215
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.		216
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.		217
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.		218
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.		219
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.		220
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.	Science	221
Now is the age of anxiety.	Time	222
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.	Music	223
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.		224
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.	Death	225
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?	Faith	226
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.		301
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.		302
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.	Forgiveness	303
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.		304
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.		305
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?		306
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.	Poetry	307
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.		308
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.		309
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.		310
I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.		311
All that we are not stares back at what we are.		312
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.	Sad	313
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.		314
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.		315
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.		316
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.	Poetry	317
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.	Travel	318
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.		319
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.		320
No hero is mortal till he dies.		321
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.		322

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