W. H. Auden Quotes

Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.

As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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

Drama is based on the Mistake.

Choice of attention — to pay attention to this and ignore that — is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

"Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.

"After all," sighed Narcissus the hunchback, "on me it looks good.

The contemplation of his reflection does not turn Narcissus into Priapus: the spell in which he is trapped is not a desire for himself but the satisfaction of not desiring the nymphs.

"I prefer my pistol to my p…," said Narcissus; "it cannot take aim without my permission" – and took a pot shot at Echo.

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.

Healing is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

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.