Though I believe it sinful to be queer, it has at least saved me from becoming a pillar of the establishment


W. H. Auden

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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
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