W. H. Auden Quotes - Page 7

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• Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.

  W. H. Auden

  Pay, Told You So, Knows

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  W. H. Auden

  Ideas, Catholic, Religion

  5 Copy quote

• Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

  W. H. Auden

  Poetry, Adjectives

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Relationship, Running

  Dyer's Hand (1963) "Hic et Ille"

  15 Copy quote

• Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ''shaggy dog'' stories; they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.

  W. H. Auden

  Dog, Missing, Religion

  7 Copy quote

• Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.

  W. H. Auden

  Remember, Forget, Has Beens

  4 Copy quote

• We were put on this earth to make things.

  W. H. Auden

  Earth

  8 Copy quote

• A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

  W. H. Auden

  May, Vices, Common

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Don Juan"), (p. 403), 1962.

  27 Copy quote

• It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.

  W. H. Auden

  Stupid, Long, People

  4 Copy quote

• The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

  W. H. Auden

  Dirty, Writing, Islands

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Writing"), (p. 22), 1962.

  5 Copy quote

• The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

  W. H. Auden

  Men, Average, Ivory Tower

  W H Auden (1981). “Antæus”, Ecco Press

  8 Copy quote

• Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.

  W. H. Auden

  Men, Important, Desire

  10 Copy quote

• If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

  W. H. Auden

  Queens, Character, Home

  8 Copy quote

• The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists

  W. H. Auden

  Men, World, Action

  'The Dyer's Hand' (1963) 'The Poet and the City'

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Birthday, Time, Money

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Work, Thinking, Men

  29 Copy quote

• The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.

  W. H. Auden

  Practice, Justice, Politics

  11 Copy quote

• If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.

  W. H. Auden

  Real, Feelings, Quality

  61 Copy quote

• A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

  W. H. Auden

  Believe, Writing, Poetry

  57 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Writing, Double Standard

  19 Copy quote

• Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.

  W. H. Auden

  Appreciation, Men, Discipline

  8 Copy quote

• Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!

  W. H. Auden

  Science, Wish, Events

  4 Copy quote

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

  W. H. Auden

  Funny Friendship, Funny Best Friend, Differences

  31 Copy quote

• In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.

  W. H. Auden

  Life, Art, Beer

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  W. H. Auden

  Love, Death, Song

  "Funeral Blues" l. 9 (1936)

  22 Copy quote

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