W. H. Auden Quotes - Page 13

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• When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Twenties, Taste

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• A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.

  W. H. Auden

  Men, Action, Life Is

  "Hail Anon, the best writer ever" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. January 13, 2008.

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• Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

  W. H. Auden

  Writing, Proud, Fame

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• If we apply the term revolution to what happened in North America between 1776 and 1829, it has a special meaning. Normally, the word describes the process by which man transforms himself from one kind of man, living in one kind of society, with one way of looking at the world, into another kind of man, another society, another conception of life.... The American case is different: it is not a question of the Old Man transforming himself into the New, but of the New Man becoming alive to the fact that he is new, that he has been transformed already without his having realized it.

  W. H. Auden

  Men, America, Special

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• The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.

  W. H. Auden

  Mother, Father, Taken

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• 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?

  W. H. Auden

  Guilt, Wealth, Drink

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• God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

  W. H. Auden

  God, Usa, America

  W. H. Auden, “On The Circuit”

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• 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.

  W. H. Auden

  Thinking, America, Two

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• 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

  Responsibility, Aristocracy, Poetic

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("American Poetry"), (p. 367), 1962.

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• Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.

  W. H. Auden

  Helping Others, Men, Earth

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• The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.

  W. H. Auden

  Funny, New Year, Holiday

  "Happy New Year" by Ligaya Mishan, www.newyorker.com. December 29, 200.

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• One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

  W. H. Auden

  Character, Thinking, Personality

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• Like love we don't know where or why Like love we cant compel or fly Like Love we often weep Like Love we seldom keep

  W. H. Auden

  Like Love, Knows, Cant

  "Law like Love" l. 57 (1939)

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• It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, People, Saint

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• Swans in the winter air
  A white perfection have

  W. H. Auden

  Winter, Swans, Air

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• What living occasion can,
  Be just to the absent?

  W. H. Auden

  Absent, Occasions

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• Intellectual disgrace
  Stares from every human face,
  And the seas of pity lie
  Locked and frozen in each eye.

  W. H. Auden

  Lying, Sadness, Eye

  "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" l. 46 (1940)

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• Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

  W. H. Auden

  Cells, Convinced

  W. H. Auden, “In Memory Of W. B. Yeats”

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• About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.

  W. H. Auden

  Suffering, Masters

  "Musee des Beaux Arts" l. 1 (1940)

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• A shilling life will give you all the facts.

  W. H. Auden

  Giving, Facts

  'Look, Stranger!' (1936) no. 13

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• Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.

  W. H. Auden

  Country, Novelists, Roles

  "Forewords and Afterwords" by W. H. Auden, ("A Poet of the Actual"), (p. 266), 1973.

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• The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.

  W. H. Auden

  Faith, Believe, Unique

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• Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.

  W. H. Auden

  Compassion, Evil, Return

  "September 1, 1939" l. 19 (1939)

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• To ask the hard question is simple.

  W. H. Auden

  Optimistic, Simple, Brainstorming

  Poems (1933) no. 27

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• Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

  W. H. Auden

  Death, Philosophical, Sound

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