W. H. Auden quote: "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."

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

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

Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs ...
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

W. H. Auden

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