W. H. Auden Quotes
W. H. Auden Quotes. Below is a collection of famous W. H. Auden quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by W. H. Auden. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
And none will hear the postman's knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
By W. H. Auden
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
By W. H. Auden
It is... 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.
By W. H. Auden
To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
By W. H. Auden
Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
By W. H. Auden
Healing, Papa would tell me, is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.
By W. H. Auden
God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
By W. H. Auden
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
By W. H. Auden
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?
By W. H. Auden
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility -- the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.
By W. H. Auden
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
By W. H. Auden
I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
By W. H. Auden
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.
By W. H. Auden
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
By W. H. Auden
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.
By W. H. Auden
Cancer is a curious thing... Nobody knows what the cause is, Though some pretend they do; It's like some hidden assassin, Waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, And men when they retire. It
By W. H. Auden
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided. A continent for better or worse divided. The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot The case as a good lawyer must. Return he would not, Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.
By W. H. Auden
The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
By W. H. Auden
The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
By W. H. Auden
We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
By W. H. Auden
To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
By W. H. Auden
No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
By W. H. Auden