W. H. Auden Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of W. H. Auden's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Poet W. H. Auden's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 432 quotes on this page collected since February 21, 1907! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral

    'Another Time' (1940) no. 18, p. 43
  • Now is the age of anxiety.

  • Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.

    W.H. Auden (2016). “Canción de cuna y otros poemas”, p.46, DEBOLS!LLO
  • A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

    "Best Quotes of '54, '55, '56". Book edited by James Beasley Simpson, 1957.
  • Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

  • August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.

    People  
    'Look, Stranger!' (1936) no. 30
  • A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothingto increase it; what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?

  • 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.

    People  
  • My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

    Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden (1981). Leonard L. Levinson, in Bartlett's Unfamiliar Quotations (1971), quotes this comment as being said about Auden by someone else.
  • Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.

    Science  
  • A shilling life will give you all the facts.

    'Look, Stranger!' (1936) no. 13
  • In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

  • Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation, And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had everything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

    "The Unknown Citizen" l. 22 (1939)
  • If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

  • The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they've realised they can't get away with it.

  • Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

  • Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

  • We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.

  • Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.

    People  
  • The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

    W.H. Auden (2016). “Canción de cuna y otros poemas”, p.148, DEBOLS!LLO
  • The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake.

  • Words have no word for words that are not true.

  • To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

    Shield of Achilles (1955) "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier"
  • Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.

    'Sir, No Man's Enemy' (1955)
  • Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

    W.H. Auden (2016). “Canción de cuna y otros poemas”, p.148, DEBOLS!LLO
  • The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.

  • To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.

  • 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.

    "Forewords and Afterwords" by W. H. Auden, ("A Poet of the Actual"), (p. 265), 1973.
  • Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.

  • To be free is often to be lonely.

    W. H. Auden, “In Memory Of Sigmund Freud”
Page 1 of 15
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • ...
  • 14
  • 15
  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 432 quotes from the Poet W. H. Auden, starting from February 21, 1907! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!