Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden slips the knife in with a smile: he frames altruism as a shared human mission, then punctures it with the sudden, comic suspicion that everyone else missed the memo. The line works because it mimics the pieties of moral instruction only to expose the vanity often hiding inside them. “We are all here…to help others” sounds like a sermon or a social-service poster; the semicolon turns it into a raised eyebrow. What follows is less confusion than indictment: if I’m oriented toward duty and you aren’t, who’s actually carrying the world?

The subtext is classic Auden: an ethical seriousness that refuses to become sanctimonious. By positioning himself as the helper, the speaker flirts with self-congratulation, then undercuts it with “I don’t know,” a phrase that performs humility while still keeping the joke’s edge. That oscillation is the point. Auden understood how easily “being good” becomes a form of social leverage, a way of ranking people. Here he makes that impulse visible without scolding; he lets the listener catch themselves.

Context matters: Auden lived through the collapse of old European certainties, the moral emergencies of fascism and war, and the mid-century argument over what art owes society. The line compresses those pressures into a domestic, quotable paradox. It’s not a manifesto; it’s a wink at the unbearable complexity of responsibility, and at the small, human desire to believe our decency is doing more work than it really is.