W. H. Auden Quotes

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Water is the soul of the Earth.

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

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.

Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.

Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss

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

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

It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.

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

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

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

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop.

How happy is the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.

The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them - the one, in fact, which is not a mask.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

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.

Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going to smash; They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods. A culture is no better than its woods.

Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last; Nurses to their graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

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

There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.

The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.

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

Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say

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

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it - not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.

Swans in the winter air A white perfection have

I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.

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

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

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

Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.

Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.

Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Christ did not enchant men; He demanded that they believe in Him: except on one occasion, the Transfiguration. For a brief while, Peter, James, and John were permitted to see Him in His glory. For that brief while they had no need of faith. The vision vanished, and the memory of it did not prevent them from all forsaking Him when He was arrested, or Peter from denying that he had ever known Him.

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.

The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.

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

And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

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

A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.