Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.


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

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Para...
W. H. AUDEN
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Par...
W. H. AUDEN
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
W. H. AUDEN
There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was bec...
FRANZ KAFKA
In all evils which admit a remedy, impatience should be avoided, because it wastes that time and att...
SAMUEL JOHNSON
There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.
FRANZ KAFKA
There is a certain degree of patience and impatience in everybody. How to balance patience and impat...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.
GUY KAWASAKI
Intuition is a suspension o f logic due to impatience.
RITA MAE BROWN
Impatience is the mark of independence not of bondage.
MARIANNE MOORE
Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage
MARIANNE MOORE
The impatient may not always be wrong on issues, but they are almost always wrong in their attitudes...
R. J. RUSHDOONY
We didn't execute against (the 1-3-1 zone) very well. Normally we do. It was our impatience. This gr...
ED PATRICK
By our pontifical assertions, our superior impatience, and our casual brushing aside of their curios...
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
Impatience is a hindrance. As with all things if you attempt to take shortcuts, the final destinatio...
CHRIS BRADFORD
Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.
MARIANNE MOORE
The Patience of Impatience is the Art of Hoping.
AK
Impatience is a virtue.
URSULA BURNS
Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience.
RITA MAE BROWN
Impatience kills quickly.
KATERINA STOYKOVA KLEMER
My worst quality is impatience.
EMMA THOMPSON
Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Patience is the support of weakness; impatience the ruin of strength.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Impatience is not becoming, for anyone.
CHARLES M FORD II
What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only...
ROBERT JACKSON BENNETT
The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you...
HILARY THAYER HAMANN
Everything takes too long for someone who is impatient.
JIM GENOVESE
One has to wait without impatience for what should come, and yet at the same time do everything with...
RODNEY COLLIN
I think in the years following Enron, investors were feeling bruised, and there was a lot of impatie...
BETH YOUNG
To make it a top-down solution isn't the answer, ... There is this incredible sense of impatience an...
CLAIRE RUBIN
Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.
HAROLD BLOOM
The golf gods don't like impatience.
JAY REYNOLDS
Nature thrives on patience; man on impatience.
PAUL BOESE
The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
LARRY WALL
The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris
LARRY WALL
What good has impatience ever brought? It has only served as the mother of mistakes and the father o...
STEVE MARABOLI
Impatience is a poor substitute for a well-considered plan.
DAVID EDDINGS
A populace never rebels from passion for attack, but from impatience of suffering.
EDMUND BURKE
Do you not realize the level of impatience I hold within my soul?
DEDRICK D. L. PITTER
Patience is sottish, and impatience does become a dog that's mad.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Impatience can cause wise people to do foolish things.
JANETTE OKE
The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Us...
ROBERT BRESSON
A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated acc...
ROLAND BARTHES
The drivers here are horrible. And by horrible, I mean they don't realize I have someplace to be.
MARIA SEMPLE
I wiggled and squirmed in my seat as if I had ants in my pants, but in reality it was merely impatie...
A.B. SHEPHERD
The choice to elevate a much younger man might signal not so much an impatience with the current pac...
JAMES KELLEHER
Many of people’s communication lines tend to break down on the side where impatience is in a rush ...
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA
Impatience translates itself into a desire to have something immediate done about it all, and, as is...
EDWARD SAPIR
Impatience is the enemy of wisdom; it propels us to jump conclusions, judge and condemn, rather than...
DEVDUTT PATTANAIK
The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience -- they give no tho...
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Youthful impatience obscures the endless potential for joy that's standing right in front of you...
GREG GUTFELD
Why the poor can never get rich,impatience. They desire riches overnight.
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
There's a generation of children who don't like black and white movies. There's a level ...
PETER JACKSON
Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.
JEAN PAUL
All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fenci...
FRANZ KAFKA
Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.
JEAN PAUL
There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bush's presidency that his gracelessness as we...
TEJU COLE
Alas, impatience is but another form of unhappiness. It is true, it is true. I have never met a happ...
RICHELLE E. GOODRICH
The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
I think American impatience has to do with the notion that we don't know what we're doing. If we cou...
ZALMAY KHALILZAD
Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the ...
ALAIN DE BOTTON
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
I slide to my knees and say, "Please let this be over." Then, I'm not ready for it to be over.
ANDRE AGASSI
Our human tendency is to be impatient with the person who cannot see the truth that is so plain to u...
HENRY B. EYRING
Turn," Liz said, trying not to hide her impatience at being forced to read at non-speed-of-light pac...
ALLY CARTER
As Christians, we needn’t be at all ashamed of some impatience, longing, opposition to what is unn...
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
As a people, I am afraid, we tend too often to brush aside with impatience, sometimes with discourte...
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
In all evils which admits a remedy, impatience should be avoided, because it wastes the time and att...
SAMUEL JOHNSON
If public opinion still endorses military action that's one thing, but if they wait maybe it wil...
HANS BLIX
Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and...
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Time goes on crutches till love have all his rites.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Nancy Pelosi brings disgrace to the word "nincum poop"
BLAIR R. LONG
The sentiment that they (the two governments) seem to be bogged down is because of the distance that...
JASWANT SINGH
Impatience is not the fastest way of getting to where your treasures are. It is the quickest way of ...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it's easy t...
ERIC ALTERMAN
LOVE is made up of a strong affection and patience whiles LUST is made up of a strong affection and ...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated pe...
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
To make it a top-down solution isn't the answer. There is this incredible sense of impatience and th...
CLAIRE RUBIN
If a man, for private profit, tears at the public news, does so with the impatience of one who think...
JIMMY BRESLIN
On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgement and effort to get thin...
ANN VOSKAMP
On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get thin...
EVELYN UNDERHILL
No one is poor who does not think they are, however, if in prosperity with impatience they desire mo...
TAYLOR JEREMY
You have an incredible body." He reaches out to touch my stomach. I feel no pleasure in his complime...
AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS
We all have certain dreams and goals we wish to achieve in life. We work hard and look forward to ge...
DR ANIL KUMAR SINHA
Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I care...
JACKIE ROBINSON
Wait and see the steps you should or should not have taken, and you shall understand patience and im...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
Love is an admiration that comes with patience. Lust is an admiration that comes with impatience. In...
ISRAELMORE AYIVOR
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future...
W.H. AUDEN
I think teenage impatience is just plain human nature! I think every generation has to cope with dif...
LORETTA YOUNG
Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilitie...
MOTHER THERESA
The root of impatience in discipline is really the same as that of overindulgence. In both instances...
RUSSELL D. MOORE
But as in the degrees of sickness thou art to submit to God, so in the kind of it (supposing equal d...
JEREMEY TAYLOR
To stand on the
brink of what is coming, feeling eager, optimistic anticipation—with no feeli...
ASK AND IT IS GIVEN
A certain amount of impatience may be useful to stimulate and motivate us to action. However, I beli...
JOSEPH B. WIRTHLIN
I like to think that my arrogance, impetuosity, impatience, selfishness and greed are the qualities ...
RICHARD HAMMOND
Be patient, but persist with a well balanced patience and impatience! Take it step by step and keep ...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
If the Christian penitent dares to ask that his many departures from the Christian norm, his impatie...
EVELYN UNDERHILL
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell t...
JAMES KELLER
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell t...
FATHER JAMES KELLER
In certain situations we'd be down and the competitor in me would want to get it all back in one pla...
BROWNING NAGLE

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
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