W. H. Auden Quotes

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time

Shall memory restore
The steps and the shore,
The face and the meeting place;

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

A fairy tale...on the other hand, demands of the reader total surrender; so long as he is in its world, there must be for him no other.

The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.

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.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

Acts of injustice done
Between the setting and the rising sun
In history lie like bones, each one.

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

Those to whom evil is done,
do evil in return

Words have no word for words that are not true.

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.

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