W. H. Auden, likewise called Wystan Hugh Auden, was an English-American poet, playwright, as well as author. He was one of one of the most popular poets of the 20th century, known for his distinct style and his comprehensive and usually complicated subject matter.
Auden was born in York, England in 1907 and also attended Oxford College, where he ended up being connected with a group of poets known as the "Auden Generation." His early poetry was identified by a blend of standard forms and also modern motifs, and he was understood for his experienced use language and his capacity to evoke a wide range of feelings in his visitors.
Throughout his job, Auden explored a wide array of themes in his writing, consisting of love, politics, religion, and also the human condition. He was additionally recognized for his witty and also often profane take on these topics, and his work usually consisted of a sharp critique of society as well as society.
Auden was likewise an accomplished dramatist and author, as well as he composed a number of plays as well as vital essays over the course of his profession. His writing was widely applauded for its intelligence, wit, and special perspective, as well as he remains among the most significant poets of the 20th century.
Auden spent much of his later life in the United States and also ended up being an American person in 1946. He died in Vienna, Austria in 1973, however his tradition remains to affect writers and also visitors worldwide.
Our collection contains 60 quotes who is written / told by H. Auden, under the main topics: Death - Music - Poetry.
"Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table"
"Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead"
"History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology"
"All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation"
"Music is the best means we have of digesting time"
"Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do"
"We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons"
"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"
"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"
"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"
"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?"
"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self"
"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"
"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"
"God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich"
"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"
"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"
"Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud"
"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"
"A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep"
"When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes"
"When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes"
"Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one"
"Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another"
"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"
