W. H. Auden Quotes

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Thousands have lived without love, none without water.

We have no destiny assigned us:
Nothing is certain but the body; we plan
To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us
Of the equality of man.

Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

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.

To make one, there must be two.

The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.

The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read
The hunter's waking thoughts.

We are, for all our polish, of little
stature, and, as human lives,
compared with authentic martyrs,
of no account.

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; <p> With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; <p> In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.