Quotes by
W.H. Auden |
1907-1973 , British poet
English-born poet and man of letters who achieved early fame in the 1930s as a hero of the left during the Great Depression. In 1939 Auden settled in the United States, becoming a U.S. citizen.His poems are about love, such as “Funeral Blues”; on political and social themes, such as “September , 1939” and “The Shield of Achilles”; on cultural and psychological themes, such as “The Age of Anxiety”; on religious themes such as “For the Time Being” and “Horae Canonicae”.
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Quotations
| • | Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. 5 |
| • | Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. 4 |
| • | Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. 4 |
| • | My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain. 3 |
| • | A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. |
| • | The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. |
| • | In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments. |
| • | Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. |
| • | Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods. |
| • | 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. |
| • | The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me. |
| • | 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. |
| • | All pity is self-pity. |
| • | All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: “I refuse to be what I am.” |
| • | To some degree every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. |
| • | 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. |
| • | No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. |
| • | When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can’t help wishing the iconoclasts had won. |
| • | Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them — the one, in fact, which is not a mask. |
| • | A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. |
| • | You owe it to all of us to get on with what you’re good at. |
| • | In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag. |
| • | The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten. |
| • | Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained. |
| • | A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. |
| • | If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me. |
| • | Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life. |
| • | All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation. |
| • | You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart. |
| • | Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling. |
| • | To be free is often to be lonely. |
| • | A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects. |
| • | The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity. |
| • | The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. |
| • | Learn from your dreams what you lack. |
| • | As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. |
| • | Water is the soul of the Earth. |
| • | Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events! |
| • | Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were. |
Quotes in Verse
| • | 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. 3 |
| • | We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table. |
