Being in this fine mood, I spoke to a little boy, whom I saw playing alone in the road, asking him what he was going to be when he grew up. Of course I expected to hear him say a sailor, a soldier, a hunter, or something else that seems heroic to childhood, and I was very much surprised when he answered innocently, 'A man.'


W. H. Davies

  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

How lucky I am to have known somebody and something that saying goodbye to is so damned awful.
EVANS G. VALENS
A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung...
PETER WESSEL ZAPFFE
Eventually I came across another passage. This is what it said:
I am not commanding you, but I ...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
To kill a mockingbird. If you haven't read it, I think you should because it is very interesting.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
I will never forget the vision of Jamie walking towards me.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
As these images were going through my head, my breathing suddenly went still. I looked at Jamie, the...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
You don't have to learn much out of books, it's like if you want to learn about cows, you go milk on...
HARPER LEE
You can't really get to know a person until you get in their shoes and walk around in them.
HARPER LEE
A Ritual to Read to Each Other


If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and...
WILLIAM STAFFORD
Lᴏᴠᴇ ɪs ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡɪɴᴅ ... Yᴏᴜ ᴄᴀɴ'ᴛ sᴇᴇ ɪᴛ, ʙᴜᴛ ʏᴏ...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
She filed the image away as an excellent and insulting question to ask the earl at an utterly inappr...
GAIL CARRIGER
With Tay, I was just trying to get a feel for him. He expressed himself candidly where he thought he...
FRAN MCCAFFERY
My father, we bumped heads when I was younger, much younger... I had different ideas that I shared w...
ZIGGY MARLEY
He (Peel) was a wonderful person. He was a genuinely nice person, which is rare in this business. He...
DAVID GEDGE
I went to a Little League game when Michael was in the sixth grade and watched him play. When I saw ...
JOE CARLUCCI
I saw a guy being really abusive to his girlfriend. She was asking people to help, but no one would....
TIMOTHY HUTTON
He was in good spirits when I spoke to him this morning. You could see that there was a little bit o...
CRAIG RIVET
I was with my mum in the shops, a ladies boutique or something, and I was asked what I wanted to be ...
LEO VARADKAR
I give [Tomes] a lot of credit. I called him this morning when he was in class and told him he was g...
BRUCE MARSHALL
He had a great game. I expected that out of him. I thought he'd be fine once he settled down a bit a...
ALPHUS SHIPMAN
I always wanted to be a rock star. That was my childhood dream. That's what I told everybody I w...
CHESTER BENNINGTON
What he did was not an irrational thing. This was a very close friend this happened to. Everyone was...
MARY MATALIN
I was very young when I saw 'Gone With the Wind,' but I fell in love with Clark Gable. And w...
CARROLL BAKER
I remember one time I wrote something very, very critical about Wilt Chamberlain. The next time I sa...
FRANK DEFORD
He seems like the real deal, man. I was really impressed with the guy. We were hoping with him being...
KAILEE WONG
I lost my dad two years ago to cancer, and before he died, I asked him to write 'Daddy's Lit...
PRIYANKA CHOPRA
I knowed a man in Paphlagonia who'd swallow a live snake every morning, when he got up. He used to s...
NEIL GAIMAN
When I saw him backing in on that ball, I knew he was going to turn and rip it. And when I saw him t...
LES RENNER
There are just some kind of men who-who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learn...
HARPER LEE
The role of the Christian is to let other people know what Jesus has done, not to think of themselve...
LEWIS N. ROE
Naturalistic atheism debunks itself. It has no power to explain even some of the most basic principl...
LEWIS N. ROE
It's important to understand that if someone calls themselves a Christian, it does not automatically...
LEWIS N. ROE
To improve that much throughout a season shows how hard he works and how dedicated he is at being a ...
VIN ABENE
When Jonathan Winters died, it was like, 'Oh, man!' I knew he was frail, but I always though...
ROBIN WILLIAMS
Plunging in “truths” about God is like walking on the bottom of a sea that is not there, searchi...
MARIANA FULGER
I just talked to him, ... he said he feels fine. It's going to be a long road for him, but he feels ...
DONALD DRIVER
I grew up looking at my father as to how to behave. In watching him I grasped so many things. His ow...
SACHIN TENDULKAR
I was 23, and he was 86. I saw a very sick man. I just wanted to just talk with him. There was no ph...
ANNA NICOLE SMITH
It's sweet and everything, but it's like you're not even there sometimes. It's great that you can li...
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
Something just told me to put up $2,500. So I put up $2,500 bail for Ibrahim, ... The thing that imp...
BRUCE HILL
When I first saw him, I saw James Dean. He had that T-shirt with the cigarettes rolled up in the sle...
CONSTANCE RAPPAPORT
When I first saw Drake, I thought I was never going to like him based on the person that I saw on T....
JAMES VINCENT MCMORROW
I like something about George W. Bush. A lot. After spending more than a decade having almost physio...
JERRY SALTZ
I saw him this afternoon, he was sitting up in a chair and he was in good spirits.
STAN ROBBS
I met with Hitchcock when I was a very, very young actress just starting out and he was making '...
HELEN MIRREN
My hero when I was a boy was Sammy Baugh, who was in the pros already, but he came from a little tow...
BOB LILLY
There was a time when I had all of his attention and loved it. As much as I wanted him to leave me a...
PENELOPE DOUGLAS
I wasn't angry; I just saw his reaction. He tried to get up off the ground, and he said, 'Hey man!' ...
JULIAN TAVAREZ
Obviously I saw him trip. I thought he was going to get up. He wasn't grabbing anything, and it look...
DALE SVEUM
I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.
GABRIELLE ZEVIN
Dad was the first man I fell in love with. He was a very funny man. He grew up in the East End of Lo...
PATSY KENSIT
Heath, I believed in him when I first met him, and helped and supported him. He went on to obvious s...
MARTIN HENDERSON
You're right,' said the corporal. 'It serves editors like that right. They only stir the people up. ...
JAROSLAV HAšEK
Nobody ever dared with Frank, because he had such mood swings, and you never knew how he was going t...
DON RICKLES
My favorite wrestler growing up was Dean Malenko. He was a very technical wrestler, and when I train...
DANIEL BRYAN
I think people expected too much from him. He gave what he could give, and there was a limit to that...
DON NELSON
I remember that, boy, oh, boy, we were really worried about him. He was a very powerful runner, but ...
AL FRACASSA
Some people never take a chance and never know what it's like to live life to the full.
CHLOE THURLOW
If it wasn't for Kenny Rogers, I don't think I would be in country music. He was that guy wh...
DARIUS RUCKER
Anyways, that very same night there was a fight in the casino on B Deck. Some of the passengers got ...
CHRISTINA ENGELA
I mean, there was a portion, of course, that I think, when I look back now, that there was a portion...
MONICA LEWINSKY
I knew my boyfriend was going to ask me to marry him. And I was sure the ring was going to be except...
RENA SOFER
He was definitely ahead of his age, way ahead of his age. He was a very driven young man at an early...
DAVE LUNDEY
When he was born, I looked at my little boy and felt an unconditional love I never knew was inside m...
TONY PARSONS
I saw a crow building a nest, I was watching him very carefully, I was kind of stalking him and he w...
TOM WAITS
I always wanted to be a rock star. That was my childhood dream. That's what i told everybody i was g...
CHESTER BENNINGTON
The Boasting Traveler A man who had traveled in foreign lands boasted very much, on returning to his...
AESOP
I learned very much from him. He was a man of great integrity. If he told you something you could ba...
CLAYTON DOWNING
I grew up with Ernie Harwell. Jack Buck is, like Ernie, an icon. Of course in 1988, when he made the...
KIRK GIBSON
Luke was going up a weight and I knew he'd be giving up some muscle. I expected him to do what he di...
TRENT ROLLINS
I bought Justin Bieber's house... He had, like, this nook under the stairs which I didn't ne...
KHLOE KARDASHIAN
Mugabe's become a disgrace to Africa. And I must say this because I am an African and a lot of u...
GEORGE AYITTEY
When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.
STANLEY KUBRICK
Stand up to injustice, even if you stand alone
SUZY KASSEM
I got a lot of influence from my father, honestly. He'd take me in his car. I'd hear Carlos ...
ACTION BRONSON
It is strange being in a crowd where no one knows your face or cares for your purpose. In Lykos, I w...
PIERCE BROWN
I spoke to him [Lee] and said 'I'm not getting a look-in and I want to be playing'. He understood th...
COLIN LEE
It was terrible, and I even told the police officer when I saw him heading down, I said, 'Where are ...
DANNY GARCIA
You hear all types of things and you try to not listen to it. I was shocked when he told us this mor...
STAN GAINES
And I had known Peter O'Toole before in London. And I'd liked him very much. And the thought of bein...
ANTHONY QUINN
I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United State...
HENRY LOUIS GATES
The little boy, Spencer Breslin, it was just so great to have a kid on set. He is talented, he's...
CAROLINE DHAVERNAS
I remember my father, when I said I was going down to Little Rock to work for Governor Clinton's...
RAHM EMANUEL
When I spoke to him he wasn't respectful. He just chewed on a straw when I asked him to take it out ...
CAROL HANSEN
Tell me something good about your life," I whispered, needing to hear that he wasn't as broken as I ...
DANI ALEXANDER
I grew up watching Jim Carrey, and I was like, 'I want to be like him. I want to do what exactly...
KIAN LAWLEY
I called Kyle, and he answered. I asked him about it, and he acted surprised. Molly? What? Who? I di...
MICK MULLINK
A tooth for a tooth, will make the world's inhabitants a people without teeth
SOTONYE ANGA
Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The atheist might have no proof for the supernatural, but they also have no proof against it. If we ...
LEWIS N. ROE
He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. ...
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
After Rilke's Letters
-- by John VanDyke Wilmerding II

this is my letter to a young ...
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Yes, their reasons are overwhelming. They are as big as hope and as deep as revolt. They are the rea...
ALBERT CAMUS
…A city deprived of everything, devoid of light and devoid of heat, starved, and still not crushed...
ALBERT CAMUS
Words always take on the color of the deeds or sacrifices they evoke.
ALBERT CAMUS
No, no. Don't make that face. Every time I propose to you, you make that twisty, unhappy face. It we...
TESSA DARE
Atticus---" ...said Jem bleakly. "How could they do it, how could they?"
"I don't know, but the...
HARPER LEE
Learn to stand for something in life otherwise you will fall for anything that comes along which is ...
EUGINIA HERLIHY
We are born different to make a difference.
LISA R. REYNOLDS
Dreams can change histories and songs can alter destinies.
TIFFANIE DEBARTOLO

More W. H. Davies

It was the rainbow gave thee birth, and left thee all her lovely hues.
W. H. DAVIES
It was a proof of Welsh good nature: so long as I had a friend that knew and could introduce me, the...
W. H. DAVIES
I had now been in the United States of America something like five years, working here and there as ...
W. H. DAVIES
Summer boarders often left clothes behind, and of what use were they to the landladies, for no rag-a...
W. H. DAVIES
I had made up my mind to find a woman to share my life: one who would leave London altogether and go...
W. H. DAVIES
I dislike society because conversation exhausts my brain more than silent thought - again, I cannot ...
W. H. DAVIES
However careful a tramp may be to avoid places where there is abundant work, he cannot always succee...
W. H. DAVIES
My impression of Americans from the beginning is of the best, and I have never since had cause to al...
W. H. DAVIES
It has always been a wonder to me where my conversational power has gone: at the present time, I can...
W. H. DAVIES
I like to see a good scientific bout by men who know the use of their hands but would rather walk tw...
W. H. DAVIES
Mother's father and brothers all took great interest in pugilism, and they knew the game well fr...
W. H. DAVIES
But cats to me are strange, so strange I cannot sleep if one is near.
W. H. DAVIES
Teetotallers lack the sympathy and generosity of men that drink.
W. H. DAVIES
How the snow falls in the north! Flake on flake falling incessantly, until the small dingles are alm...
W. H. DAVIES
What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?
W. H. DAVIES
I like to give pennies to children, but unfortunately, a man cannot do these things if he lives in a...
W. H. DAVIES
As long as I love Beauty I am young.
W. H. DAVIES
The more help a person has in his garden, the less it belongs to him.
W. H. DAVIES
My own wandering blood comes from my seafaring grandfather, who, after he had left the sea and settl...
W. H. DAVIES
We were determined to be in the fashion, and to visit the various delightful watering places on Long...
W. H. DAVIES
Cockneys make good beggars. They are held in high esteem by the fraternity in America. Their resourc...
W. H. DAVIES
There is quite a large clan of Scotties among American beggars. He is a good beggar for the simple r...
W. H. DAVIES
I don't suppose there is a more daring or more impudent rascal on earth than a good American beg...
W. H. DAVIES
It is not altogether shyness that now makes me unsuccessful in company. Sometimes it is a state of m...
W. H. DAVIES
What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?
WILLIAM H. DAVIES
What's all this fuss about fathers being present at the birth of their children? The way events are ...
GEORGE H. DAVIES
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Para...
W. H. AUDEN
The more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.
W. H. MURRAY
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.
W. H. MURRAY
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
W. H. MURRAY
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
Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regre...
W. H. SHELDON
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
Be true to the best you know. This is your high ideal. If you do your best, you cannot do more.
H. W. DRESSES
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
Know how sublime a thing is to suffer and be strong.
H. W. LONGFELLOW
You would attain to the divine perfection....
H. W. LONGFELLOW
Something attempted, something done, Has earned a nights repose.
H. W. LONGFELLOW
The worst bankruptcy in the world is the person who has lost his enthusiasm.
H. W. ARNOLD
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
We are none of us infallible--not even the youngest of us.
W. H. THOMPSON
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
Commemoration of John Wycliffe, Reformer, 1384 [John] Wycliffe's doctrine of "dominion founded i...
W. H. SUMMERS
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