In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.


W.H. Auden

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In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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The tax tail should never wag the investment dog.
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Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his tail.
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Air is approximately 21% oxygen, our brains feed off of oxygen. So basically we are all airheads.
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Inspired By Beauty In Creation We Are One
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If we're honest, most of us are doing okay.
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Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day.
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Economics should always be paramount over tax considerations. Don't let the tax tail wag the investm...
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We are all disciples of the light.
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Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.
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Each of us views life through a different lens. What we think is colored by the baggage we carry, an...
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I've always said money may buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail.
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We could all do with a bit more joy in our lives couldn't we? The wonderful thing is that when we st...
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Voter apathy is a civic abdication.
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The answer isn't more time but a greater awareness of the time we have.
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And I think that's the story of our generation's pursuit of fulfillment in relationships. We wished ...
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The words you can’t find, you borrow.
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Most of all, we remain focused on our Rock that never moves.
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We could have met several times in December; unfortunately, PTEA rejected all of those dates.
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we
sat there
smoking
cigarettes
at
5
in the morning.
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What is the meaning of life…to give life meaning.
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After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his snuffs and grunts and barks. ...
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We live in blatantly corrupt times.
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The farmer in us makes us do the things we do
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I have a hundred times wished that one could resign life as an officer resigns a commission.
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He possessed a lot of qualities that we wanted in a consultant.
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The birth of a child is a joy to the parent and the world.
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We should not blame people by the mistakes of others.
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Aliens have been here for millennium.
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We trotted, coach-dog fashion, at the heels of the human race, our tails wag.
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Sleep did not honor me with it’s presence.
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If sex were all, then every trembling hand
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Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.
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'Tis merry in hall Where beards wag all. - Thomas Tusser,
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We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
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To make one, there must be two.
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The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
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A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish...
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And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can be...
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
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Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
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Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The realit...
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Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I ...
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Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shad...
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Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog fro...
W.H. AUDEN
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, th...
W.H. AUDEN
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future...
W.H. AUDEN
For poetry makes nothing happen.
W.H. AUDEN
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed li...
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Among those whom I like, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all o...
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I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
W.H. AUDEN
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews
Not to be born is the best for man
T...
W.H. AUDEN
A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.
W.H. AUDEN
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, th...
W.H. AUDEN
The friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake;
W.H. AUDEN
Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.
W.H. AUDEN
The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
W.H. AUDEN
Base words are uttered only by the base
And can for such at once be understood;
But noble ...
W.H. AUDEN
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
W.H. AUDEN
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, ...
W.H. AUDEN
No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the o...
W.H. AUDEN
Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false...
W.H. AUDEN

More 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
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
W.H. AUDEN
To make one, there must be two.
W.H. AUDEN
The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
W.H. AUDEN
A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish...
W.H. AUDEN
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can be...
W.H. AUDEN
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W.H. AUDEN
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
W.H. AUDEN
Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The realit...
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
Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shad...
W.H. AUDEN
Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog fro...
W.H. AUDEN
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, th...
W.H. AUDEN
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future...
W.H. AUDEN
For poetry makes nothing happen.
W.H. AUDEN
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed li...
W.H. AUDEN
Among those whom I like, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all o...
W.H. AUDEN
I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
W.H. AUDEN
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews
Not to be born is the best for man
T...
W.H. AUDEN
A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.
W.H. AUDEN
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, th...
W.H. AUDEN
The friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake;
W.H. AUDEN
Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.
W.H. AUDEN
The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
W.H. AUDEN
Base words are uttered only by the base
And can for such at once be understood;
But noble ...
W.H. AUDEN
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
W.H. AUDEN
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, ...
W.H. AUDEN
No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the o...
W.H. AUDEN
Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false...
W.H. AUDEN
Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book rea...
W.H. AUDEN
I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps ov...
W.H. AUDEN
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W.H. AUDEN
Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
W.H. AUDEN
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not ...
W.H. AUDEN
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain an...
W.H. AUDEN
The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all ...
W.H. AUDEN
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
P...
W.H. AUDEN
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W.H. AUDEN
In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) ...
W.H. AUDEN
We must love one another or die
W.H. AUDEN
Thoughts on his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic.
W.H. AUDEN
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep
W.H. AUDEN
There are good books which are only for adults.
There are no good books which are only for chil...
W.H. AUDEN
What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced socie...
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
There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sl...
W.H. AUDEN
You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eye...
W.H. AUDEN
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
W.H. AUDEN
What is this life so full of care,
We don't have time to stand and stare.
W.H. DAVIES
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand ...
W.H. DAVIES
Concerning all acts of iniative and creation, there is one elementary truth- that the moment one def...
W.H. MURRAY
Now shall I walk or shall I ride?
'Ride,' Pleasure said;
'Walk,' Joy replied.
W.H. DAVIES
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No ti...
W.H. DAVIES
I love thee for a heart that’s kind--not for the knowledge in thy mind.
W.H. DAVIES
This man has talent, that man genius
And here's the strange and cruel difference:
Talent g...
W.H. DAVIES
Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and star...
W.H. DAVIES
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
W.H. DAVIES
The thing has way more value in inspiration than in clean-energy production.
AUDEN SCHENDLER
The most important thing we could do at X Games is reach this generation with a message about climat...
AUDEN SCHENDLER
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I...
WH AUDEN
Our whole environmental program is organized under the umbrella of climate. Climate change should be...
AUDEN SCHENDLER
Some companies (buying insurance) may be stunned by how much rates will go up.
JAMES 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...
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Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and...
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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