W. H. Auden Quotes

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

All time spent reading is time well-spent.

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

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.

Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good — we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know — and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.

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.

Thoughts of his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic.

Lay your sleeping head, my love Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral; But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie: Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful.

حين كان يضحك
كان أعضاء مجلس الشيوخ الموقرون ينفجرون بالضحك
وحين كان يبكي
كان الأطفال يموتون في الشوارع

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.

"But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry."

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise

We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

Small tyrants, threatened by big,
sincerely believe
they love liberty.