W. H. Auden Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.

  W. H. Auden

  Attention, Pay, Praying

  9 Copy quote

• A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

  W. H. Auden

  Love, Enchantment, Lasts

  9 Copy quote

• If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.

  W. H. Auden

  Soul, Hell, Ifs

  10 Copy quote

• What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?

  W. H. Auden

  Exercise, Answers, Should

  11 Copy quote

• A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

  W. H. Auden

  Dog, Children, Men

  11 Copy quote

• To be free is often to be lonely.

  W. H. Auden

  Lonely

  W. H. Auden, “In Memory Of Sigmund Freud”

  19 Copy quote

• There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.

  W. H. Auden

  Children, Book, Adults

  18 Copy quote

• All I have is a voice.

  W. H. Auden

  Voice

  Another Time (1940) "September 1, 1939"

  27 Copy quote

• A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

  W. H. Auden

  Music, Art, Thinking

  19 Copy quote

• How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

  W. H. Auden

  Stars, Passion, Return

  W. H. Auden, “The More Loving One”

  13 Copy quote

• Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.

  W. H. Auden

  Past, Men, History

  Dyer's Hand (1963) "D. H. Lawrence"

  10 Copy quote

• A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.

  W. H. Auden

  Dream, Men, Order

  7 Copy quote

• A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.

  W. H. Auden

  Insane, Facts, Would Be

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Eye, Hands, Bored

  29 Copy quote

• There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Sleep, Men

  24 Copy quote

• It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.

  W. H. Auden

  Suffering, Criticism, Ugly

  22 Copy quote

• Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.

  W. H. Auden

  Relationship, Goodness, Easier

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Media, Political

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("The Poet & The City"), (p. 83), 1962.

  31 Copy quote

• All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Sick, Letters

  21 Copy quote

• A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.

  W. H. Auden

  Love, Character, Mean

  70 Copy quote

• All pity is self-pity.

  W. H. Auden

  Self, Self Pity, Pity

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Interlude: West's Disease"), (p. 243), 1962.

  5 Copy quote

• History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

  W. H. Auden

  History, Answers, Study

  37 Copy quote

• Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

  W. H. Auden

  Confusion, Confusing, Funny Basketball

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  W. H. Auden

  Writing, Eye, Men

  13 Copy quote

• People always get what they want. But there is a price for everything. Failures are either those who do not know what they want or are not prepared to pay the price asked them. The price varies from individual to individual. Some get things at bargain-sale prices, others only at famine prices. But it is no use grumbling. Whatever price you are asked, you must pay.

  W. H. Auden

  Pay The Price, People, Grumbling

  23 Copy quote

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