We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know.
W. H. Auden
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
W. H. Auden
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
W. H. Auden
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
W. H. Auden
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
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
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
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
W. H. Auden
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
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. Auden
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you’re good at.
W. H. Auden
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
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.
W. H. Auden
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. Auden
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
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
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.
W. H. Auden
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
W. H. Auden
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
Art is born of humiliation.
W. H. Auden
A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.
W. H. Auden
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
Healing,’ Papa would tell me, ‘is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.’
W. H. Auden
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
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.
W. H. Auden
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
W. H. Auden
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I’d pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. Auden
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
W. H. Auden
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
W. H. Auden
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
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.
W. H. Auden
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
W. H. Auden
Now is the age of anxiety.
W. H. Auden
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
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 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.
W. H. Auden
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
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.
W. H. Auden
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. Auden
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
W. H. Auden
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
W. H. Auden