W. H. Auden, also known as Wystan Hugh Auden, was an English-American poet, playwright, and essayist. He was one of the most prominent poets of the 20th century, known for his distinct style and his wide-ranging and often complex subject matter.
Auden was born in York, England in 1907 and attended Oxford University, where he became associated with a group of poets known as the "Auden Generation." His early poetry was characterized by a blend of traditional forms and modern themes, and he was known for his skillful use of language and his ability to evoke a wide range of emotions in his readers.
Throughout his career, Auden explored a wide variety of themes in his writing, including love, politics, religion, and the human condition. He was also known for his witty and often irreverent take on these subjects, and his work often contained a sharp critique of society and culture.
Auden was also an accomplished playwright and essayist, and he wrote a number of plays and critical essays over the course of his career. His writing was widely praised for its intelligence, wit, and unique perspective, and he remains one of the most influential poets of the 20th century.
Auden spent much of his later life in the United States and became an American citizen in 1946. He died in Vienna, Austria in 1973, but his legacy continues to influence writers and readers around the world.
Our collection contains 60 quotes who is written / told by H. Auden, under the main topics: Death - Music - Poetry.
60 Famous quotes by W. H. Auden
"All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation"
"Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy"
"My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain"
"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"
"Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table"
"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"
"Art is born of humiliation"
"All that we are not stares back at what we are"
"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"
"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"
"The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind"
"Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return"
"May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?"
"It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen"
"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self"
"Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic"
"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"
"A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become"
"A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb"
"The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living"
"We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons"
"Now is the age of anxiety"
"No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted"
"Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession"
"It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ"
"Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say"
"For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?"
"A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us"
"'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'"
"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about"
"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"
"Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead"
"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"
"Music is the best means we have of digesting time"
"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language"
"To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?"
"Thousands have lived without love, not one without water"
"Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality"
"A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects"
"We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know"
"The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own"
"Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell"
"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"
"Learn from your dreams what you lack"
"It is 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"
"In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag"
"Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good"
"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"
"Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores"
"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"
