Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life


W. H. Auden

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep
W.H. AUDEN
In those whom I like, I can find no common denominator; in those whom I love I can: they all make me...
W. H. AUDEN
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a litt...
J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I ...
W. H. AUDEN
Dive into the river of the present, but don't thrash about, go with the flow.
JIM GENOVESE
Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.
KAZUO ISHIGURO
Slowly, Anna put up a hand to his muzzle and began to scratch that spot behind the ear where large d...
EVA IBBOTSON
Go with the flow even if there are rapids ahead.
JIM GENOVESE
I like dogs
Big dogs
Little dogs
Fat dogs
Doggy dogs
Old dogs
Puppy do...
MARGARET WISE BROWN
If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about.
SHARON DELAROSE
Some dogs just don't grow. Must be the same with people.
TOMMY ALLAIN
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No ti...
W.H. DAVIES
My doggy had to go.
KEVIN SPACEY
Because dogs live in the present. Because dogs don't hold grudges. Because dogs let go of all their ...
STEVEN ROWLEY
Now shall I walk or shall I ride?
'Ride,' Pleasure said;
'Walk,' Joy replied.
W.H. DAVIES
Everybody is on the run. Either from something or someone.
ANTHONY T. HINCKS
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
ALLEN GINSBERG
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
ALLEN GINSBERG
The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. ...
EUGENE H. PETERSON
To get over the past, you first have to accept that the past is over. No matter how many times you r...
MANDY HALE
A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.
KIM JONG IL
The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to yo...
SUE MONK KIDD
Of course everything that shines ain't always gonna be gold. You want -REAL- gold? Go mine for it an...
DEDRICK D. L. PITTER
What is this life so full of care,
We don't have time to stand and stare.
W.H. DAVIES
Don't resist life, flow with it.
JIM GENOVESE
Life is more like dancing than wrestling if you follow its rhythm.
JIM GENOVESE
I'm a dreadful romantic. No matter what I go through in life, I want to fall in love with a man.
RACHEL HUNTER
The Simpsons can go anywhere in the world and not worry about any budgetary issues. However, even wh...
DAN CASTELLANETA
The first presidential election I really paid attention to was in 1988 when George H. W. Bush ran ag...
DANA PERINO
For lack of a better term, I'm just ready for some closure. This thing has run its course.
GARY JOE KINNE
Audience needs are changing -- they want to consume media on their terms, anytime, anyplace, anyhow....
ASHLEY HIGHFIELD
You're full of contradictions, Ms. Wallace."
I looked up at him and arched a brow. "I'm a girl...
TAMMARA WEBBER
We are due in Bristol. Hopefully the jinx has run its course.
JOE NEMECHEK
I love thee for a heart that’s kind--not for the knowledge in thy mind.
W.H. DAVIES
The only way he could have her was to shatter this stubborn faith of hers. In doing so, would he sha...
FRANCINE RIVERS
Art must be parochial in the beginning to be cosmopolitan in the end.
GEORGE A. MOORE
Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man root...
JOSEPH CONRAD
To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country. - Thomas W. Higginso...
THOMAS W. HIGGINSON
The Shield had run its course as a three-man group, and we'll go down in history as one of the g...
SETH ROLLINS
Walking with my doggy is so much fun!
And she makes me laugh, she makes me run.
Licking ...
ANA CLAUDIA ANTUNES
People have tried to corner the market on being offended, corner the market on language and corner t...
PATRICE O'NEAL
That's my spot - in the corner. I was on my way here. My back would have been right there.
DAVID BENTLEY
Children are like water; they don't much care where the stream takes them. They do nothing to avoid ...
NILESH RATHOD
Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful telev...
CLAIRE TOMALIN
If I provide for this life and turn away from the Lord, I am wise for a moment, but lost forever.
FRANCINE RIVERS
The only way he could have her was to shatter this stubborn faith of hers. In doing so, would he sha...
FRANCINE RIVERS
For a firm like H&R Block, credibility is of paramount importance. If the H&R Block story becomes fo...
JAMES MCALEXANDER
Eating with a dog nearby may turn some customers off. But then there are some people who do everythi...
CHRIS ARMSTRONG
Though there are some notable exceptions, by and large the persistent ranting of the Warren Commissi...
VINCENT BUGLIOSI
I have a lot of great racing memories growing up in Europe as a young boy - playing with car parts o...
CHARLIE KIMBALL
On some days she was able to see both sun and moon at the same time. Like feuding cousins, they hung...
CARLA H. KRUEGER
Voice of the Sea Dogs.
JERRY GREEN
Even if the auction does not go to where some people expected it to, the stock had a great run up. I...
JOHN MCMILLIN
All travellers who had preceded me into the Barren Grounds had relied on the abundant game, and in c...
ERNEST THOMPSON SETON
Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrot...
CRAIG BROWN
Whenever it is in any way possible, every boy and girl should choose as his life work some occupatio...
WILLIAM LYON PHELPS
The regulatory process should be able to run its course.
DENNIS DUFFY
most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip o...
RAINER MARIA RILKE
We are waiting for the investigation to run its course. It's through the investigation we will get t...
LARA RAMSBURG
With that green and the way the wind swirls in that corner of the golf course, playing that hole in ...
CHARLES HOWELL
Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willing...
J.G. BALLARD
The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas.
BORIS JOHNSON
This instant is the only time there is.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
I am never upset for the reason I think.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Perception is a mirror not a fact. And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Teach only love for that is what you are.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Only my condemnation injures me.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
I can elect to change all thoughts that hurt.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
Only your mind can produce fear.
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
I myself don't like doggy doors. It's just another opening for someone to get in. Even that small? E...
MARK LUMPKIN
One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange,...
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand de...
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
Of course the playoffs are still on our mind. We're in a position for the last playoff spot with a f...
JASON RICHARDSON
Beginning with the Clinton Administration and rapidly accelerating with the George W. Bush and Obama...
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
All rivers, even the most dazzling, those that catch the sun in their course, all rivers go down to ...
SIMONE SCHWARZ-BART
I dont think having a My Chemical Romance action figure will make a kid start his own band, I like t...
GERARD WAY
Get pass your past, be a presence in your present, and let no one refute your future.
JOHNNIE DENT JR.
I wanted to go into a football program where I could go in and battle for a starting spot.
MARIO BROWN
This man has talent, that man genius
And here's the strange and cruel difference:
Talent g...
W.H. DAVIES
Hopefully, at some point, people will at least credit the Republicans with carrying out their oversi...
BARBARA OLSON
Two summers ago I went out to teach a directing course for Saskatchewan Theatre and David McNally wa...
BRADLEY MOSS
There's nothing as useful as the truth, in terms of ruining anyone's day, week, month, year, decade,...
WILL ADVISE
There is always a solution to any problem.
Find opportunities in any circumstance. Never become...
LAILAH GIFTY AKITA
Taking the path of least resistance is always helpful and peaceful, which is always in line with you...
HINA HASHMI
Taking the path of least resistance is always helpful and peaceful, which is always in line with you...
HINA HASHMI
Another thing I take issue with are people who take their dogs on "play dates," or even worse, peopl...
CHELSEA HANDLER
My business life takes a big chunk of time, but I still put exercise in my schedule. I'm up at 5...
CESAR MILLAN
We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but cr...
JOHN GREEN
As a teacher, your job is to motivate your unmotivated student. This is how you shape the future
SOTONYE ANGA
Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going. Of course, so...
NORTON JUSTER
Disclaimer - These opiini^H^H damn! ^H^H ^Q ^[ .... :w :q :wq :wq! ^d X ^? exit X Q ^C ^? :quitbye C...
B. F. SKINNER
Great balls of fire. Don't bother me anymore, and don't call me sugar.
MARGARET MITCHELL
I'm in the middle of the road, it seems vague of unclear way, of where I'm going but no matter what ...
HLONIM
They stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned.
JACK KEROUAC
I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotives howling off in to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my...
JACK KEROUAC
I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzing past. On the Road is a semi-autobiographi...
CORY DOCTOROW
Women have to harness their power - its absolutely true. It's just learning not to take the first no...
CHER
I was told I had just walked into doggy happy hour. It was just the greatest thing. The people who s...
DAN COHEN

More W. H. Auden

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Para...
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, consideri...
W. H. AUDEN
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a ...
W. H. AUDEN
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. AUDEN
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
W. H. AUDEN
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him ...
W. H. AUDEN
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature...
W. H. AUDEN
Art is born of humiliation.
W. H. AUDEN
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
W. H. AUDEN
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
W. H. AUDEN
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
W. H. AUDEN
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed li...
W. H. AUDEN
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
W. H. AUDEN
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the othe...
W. H. AUDEN
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I ...
W. H. AUDEN
In those whom I like, I can find no common denominator; in those whom I love I can: they all make me...
W. H. AUDEN
Continuing a short series on forgiveness: Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. ("To know all i...
W. H. AUDEN
All theological language is necessarily analogical, but it was singularly unfortunate that the Churc...
W. H. AUDEN
Commemoration of Cecile Isherwood, Founder of the Community of the Resurrection, Grahamstown, South ...
W. H. AUDEN
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. AUDEN
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Par...
W. H. AUDEN
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. AUDEN
Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. AUDEN
We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
W H AUDEN
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich ma...
W. H. AUDEN
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and...
W. H. AUDEN
Eagerly, musician,Sweep your string,So we may sing,Elated, optative,Our several voicesInterblending,...
W. H. AUDEN
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. AUDEN
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the oth...
W. H. AUDEN
You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.
W. H. AUDEN
We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
W. H. AUDEN
You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a s...
W. H. AUDEN
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mist...
W. H. AUDEN
In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it b...
W. H. AUDEN
A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A c...
W. H. AUDEN
Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinkin...
W. H. AUDEN
Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of charac...
W. H. AUDEN
It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say,...
W. H. AUDEN
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life ...
W. H. AUDEN
Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are sha...
W. H. AUDEN
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. AUDEN
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. AUDEN
America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who cl...
W. H. AUDEN
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrat...
W. H. AUDEN
There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them...
W. H. AUDEN
The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a s...
W. H. AUDEN
My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible...
W. H. AUDEN
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am fr...
W. H. AUDEN
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
W. H. AUDEN
It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which...
W. H. AUDEN
Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'l...
W. H. AUDEN
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
W. H. AUDEN
Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. ...
W. H. AUDEN
We must love one another or die.
W. H. AUDEN
We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country becaus...
W. H. AUDEN
A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
W. H. AUDEN
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for...
W. H. AUDEN
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich ma...
W. H. AUDEN
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
W. H. AUDEN
What people don't realize is that intimacy has its conventions as well as ordinary social intercours...
W. H. AUDEN
Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefe...
W. H. AUDEN
The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life...
W. H. AUDEN
How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so hig...
W. H. AUDEN
Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a f...
W. H. AUDEN
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. AUDEN
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in...
W. H. AUDEN
To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual s...
W. H. AUDEN
Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. AUDEN
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I ...
W. H. AUDEN
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. AUDEN
If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willful...
W. H. AUDEN
The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when ...
W. H. AUDEN
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. AUDEN
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of...
W. H. AUDEN
It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself...
W. H. AUDEN
A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scien...
W. H. AUDEN
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their trivial...
W. H. AUDEN
God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of ho...
W. H. AUDEN
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to...
W. H. AUDEN
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
W. H. AUDEN
Funeral Blues


W. H. AUDEN
Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so con...
W. H. AUDEN
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. AUDEN
Healing, Papa would tell me, is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.
W. H. AUDEN
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to ...
W. H. AUDEN
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, th...
W. H. AUDEN
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular c...
W. H. AUDEN
It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people b...
W. H. AUDEN
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
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, consideri...
W. H. AUDEN
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
W. H. AUDEN
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would cal...
W. H. AUDEN
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, ...
W. H. AUDEN
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet dev...
W. H. AUDEN
Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to...
W. H. AUDEN
Cancer is a curious thing...
Nobody knows what the cause is,
Though some pretend they do;
I...
W. H. AUDEN
I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make ...
W. H. AUDEN
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his...
W. H. AUDEN
Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.
W. H. AUDEN
Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their aff...
W. H. AUDEN
As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption....
W. H. AUDEN
You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
W. H. AUDEN
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a m...
W. H. AUDEN
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good ...
W. H. AUDEN
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided.
A continent for better or worse divided. W. H. AUDEN
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all ...
W. H. AUDEN
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they s...
W. H. AUDEN
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the ...
W. H. AUDEN
The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father h...
W. H. AUDEN
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
W. H. AUDEN
The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in ...
W. H. AUDEN
The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most pa...
W. H. AUDEN
Criticism should be a casual conversation.
W. H. AUDEN
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will...
W. H. AUDEN
Now is the age of anxiety.
W. H. AUDEN
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the ot...
W. H. AUDEN
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
W H AUDEN
It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in whi...
W. H. AUDEN
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
W. H. AUDEN
One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
W. H. AUDEN
A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.
W. H. AUDEN
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. AUDEN
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the m...
W. H. AUDEN
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
W. H. AUDEN
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
W. H. AUDEN
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. AUDEN
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as...
W. H. AUDEN
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology ...
W. H. AUDEN
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into ...
W. H. AUDEN
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, ...
W. H. AUDEN
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
W. H. AUDEN
To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. AUDEN
No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. AUDEN
False enchantment can last a lifetime.
W. H. AUDEN
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. AUDEN
When the Sex War ended with the slaughter of the Grandmothers, / They found a bachelor's baby suffoc...
W. H. AUDEN
Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores
W. H. AUDEN
'Healing,'' Papa would tell me, ''is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
W. H. AUDEN
Embrace me, belly, like a bride.
W. H. AUDEN
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession
W. H. AUDEN
O for doors to be open and an invite with gilded edges / To dine with Lord Lobcock and Count Asthma.
W. H. AUDEN
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-Second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of ...
W. H. AUDEN
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction ...
W. H. AUDEN
The nightingales are sobbing in / The orchards of our mothers, / And hearts that we broke long ago /...
W. H. AUDEN
The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very dif...
W. H. AUDEN
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. AUDEN
If there are any of you at the back who do not hear me, please don't raise your hands because I am a...
W. H. AUDEN
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
W. H. AUDEN
Look, stranger, at this island now / The leaping light for your delight discovers.
W. H. AUDEN
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their conscience...
W. H. AUDEN
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in ...
W. H. AUDEN
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good
W. H. AUDEN
lay your faithless head upon my arm
W. H. AUDEN
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen
W. H. AUDEN
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain ...
W. H. AUDEN
Hunger allows no choice, To the citizens or the police; We must love one another or die
W. H. AUDEN
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator; but among those whom I love, I ...
W. H. AUDEN
Five minutes on even the nicest mountain / Is awfully long.
W. H. AUDEN
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the oth...
W. H. AUDEN
'In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away,And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day.
W. H. AUDEN
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy
W. H. AUDEN
A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scien...
W. H. AUDEN
But in my arms till break of dayLet the living creature lie,Mortal, guilty, but to meThe entirely be...
W. H. AUDEN
Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ''s...
W. H. AUDEN
All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation
W. H. AUDEN
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me
W. H. AUDEN
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep
W. H. AUDEN
No hero is immortal till he dies
W. H. AUDEN
Let mortals beware of wordsFor with words we lieCan speak peaceWhen we mean warBut song is trueLet m...
W. H. AUDEN
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a ...
W. H. AUDEN
All that we are not stares back at what we are
W. H. AUDEN
. . . see without looking, . . . hear without listening, . . . breathe without asking.
W. H. AUDEN
Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places.
W. H. AUDEN
Alone, alone, about the dreadful wood / Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, / Dreading to find it...
W. H. AUDEN
Though I believe it sinful to be queer, it has at least saved me from becoming a pillar of the estab...
W. H. AUDEN
Within these breakwaters English is spoken; without / Is the immense, improbable atlas.
W. H. AUDEN
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content/ That he held the proper opinions for the time of ye...
W. H. AUDEN
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their conscience...
W. H. AUDEN
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
W. H. AUDEN
I know nothing, except what everyone knows – if there when Graces dances, I should dance.
W. H. AUDEN
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a jou...
W. H. AUDEN
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know
W. H. AUDEN
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
W. H. AUDEN
We would rather be ruined than changed, We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the...
W. H. AUDEN
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say
W. H. AUDEN
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of...
W. H. AUDEN
But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime:'O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conq...
W. H. AUDEN
It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfish...
W. H. AUDEN
Pleasure is by no means an infallible guide, but it is the least fallible.
W. H. AUDEN
Poor Poe! At first so forgotten that his grave went without a tomb-stone twenty-six years. . . today...
W. H. AUDEN
Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science
W. H. AUDEN
In the nightmare of the dark - All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each seques...
W. H. AUDEN
Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. AUDEN
When it comes, will it come without warning/ Just as I'm picking my nose?/ Will it knock on my door ...
W. H. AUDEN
Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
W. H. AUDEN
If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willful...
W. H. AUDEN
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will...
W. H. AUDEN
Few writers have had less journalistic talent than James, and this is his defect, for the supreme ma...
W. H. AUDEN
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
W. H. AUDEN