W. H. Auden Quotes | GloryQuotes

W. H. Auden Quotes About Art

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

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.

W. H. Auden Quotes About Writing

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

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

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

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

More Quotes by W. H. Auden

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.

Browse 75 quotes attributed to W. H. Auden, listed in the source data as a English Poet, organized around themes such as Art, Writing, Money. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.