Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden turns moral language into a bleak piece of behavioral science: sin isn’t just wrong, it’s sticky. The line’s power comes from its refusal to treat vice as a one-off lapse. “All sins tend to be addictive” frames wrongdoing as habit-forming, a technology of the self that rewires desire. You don’t merely choose sin; sin starts choosing you, narrowing the range of what feels possible until repetition looks like fate.

The second clause lands like a trapdoor. “Terminal point” borrows the cold diction of medicine and diagnostics, making “damnation” sound less like medieval theatrics and more like a prognosis. Auden’s subtext is that hell is not primarily a punishment imposed from outside, but the end-state of a trajectory: a person slowly trained into spiritual numbness, relational ruin, and the inability to want the good. That’s why the sentence feels modern even when it’s theologically loaded. It speaks the language of compulsion, escalation, and loss of agency.

Context matters: Auden is a poet who returned to Christian faith after the ideological intoxications of the 1930s and the catastrophic hangover of World War II. He’d watched political “sins” scale into systems, and private indulgences harden into public brutality. The warning isn’t prudish; it’s structural. Call it addiction, call it damnation - either way, Auden is naming the same mechanism: the self’s gradual conversion into its own prison.