The More Loving One Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.
W.H. Auden
Related People are not an interruption of our business. People are our business. A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes. It is hard to look up to a leader who keeps his ear to the ground. The most wasted day of all is that in which we have not laughed. The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in men. Ordinary people see no diff... The intelligence is proved not by ease of learning, but by understanding what we learn. Communication is something so simple and difficult that we can never put it in simple words. Like threads of silver seen through crystal beads Let love through good deeds show. How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it. In everyone's heart stirs a great homesickness. That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it. Our wisdom comes usually from our experience, and our experience comes largely from our experience. One thing about the school of experience is that it will repeat the lesson if you flunk the first ti... To reprove small faults within due vehemence, is as absurd as if a man should take a great hammer to... Faith is like electricity. You can't see it, but you can see the light. Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it by the handle of anxiety, or by the handle of... Some families can trace their ancestors back three hundred years, but can't tell you where their chi... A recent survey was said to prove that the people we Americans most admire are our politicians and d... If a man defrauds you one time, he is a rascal; if he does it twice, you are a fool. Flattery looks like friendship, just like a wolf looks like a dog. Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admired when it ... Freedom also includes the right to mismanage your own affairs. Let your friends be the friends of your deliberate choice. The man who has strong opinions and always says what he thinks is courageous - and friendless. Friendship is love with understanding. So few people think. When we find one who really does, we call him a genius Your life can't go according to plan if you have no plan. Practicing the Golden Rule is not a sacrifice; it is an investment. Conversation is an exercise of the mind; gossip is merely an exercise of the tongue. An expert gossiper knows how much to leave out of a conversation To live so that you would not be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip, is to have li... Gossip is sometimes referred to as halitosis of the mind If you would attain greatness, think no little thoughts. We are born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy. People are changed, not by coercion or intimidation, but by example. Children are natural mimics; they act like their parents in spite of every effort to teach them good... The guilty catch themselves. Good habits are formed; bad habits we fall into. If happiness could be brought, few of us could pay the price. Happiness will never come to those who fail to appreciate what they already have. Happiness is in the heart, not in the circumstances. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. Hatred is a boomerang which is sure to hit you harder than the one at whom you throw it. Hate pollutes the mind. If we miraculously became the people we hate, how lovable we would find ourselves. To feel "fit as a fiddle" you must tone down your middle. Our health always seems much more valuable after we lose it. A patient going to a doctor for his first visit was asked, "And whom did you consult before coming t... "Oh," replied his patient, with no malice aforethought, "he told me to come and see you." It is impossible to make wisdom hereditary. Honesty is a question of right or wrong, not a matter of policy. It is a pleasure to give advice, humiliating to need it, normal to ignore it. It is almost impossible to smile on the outside without feeling better on the inside. Too many people confine their exercise to jumping to conclusions, running up bills, stretching the t... Imagination was given man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for ... Humor - the perfect relationship of the parts to the whole. Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth - a sense of humor. "What made the deepest impression upon you?" inquired a friend one day of Lincoln, "when you stood i... It isn't easy for an idea to squeeze itself into a head filled with prejudice. Too many people run out of ideas long before they run out of words. Imagination is the pontoon bridge making way for the timid feet of reason. Practical observation commonly consists of collecting a few facts and loading them with guesses. Friendship is a living thing that lasts only as long as it is nourished with kindness, empathy and u... Having supplied them with names, omnipotence, justice, knowledge, Providence, - what are they? A good laugh is sunshine in a house. When you laugh, be sure to laugh at what people do and not at what people are. One look around us ought to show that all our arbitrary measures and bounds have been clamped on us ... No punishment of the unrighteous has ever been too severe in the eyes of the righteous. Why keep on enacting laws when we already have more than we can break. The best leader is the one who has the sense to surround himself with outstanding people and self-re... Advice is the only commodity on the market where the supply always exceeds the demand. Successful men follow the same advice they prescribe for others. You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea Old age may seem a long way off. But on the day it doesn't, it will be too late to do anything about... Age withers only the outside. Where ambition ends happiness begins. The best answer to answer to anger is silence. The size of a man is measured by the size of the thing that makes him angry. A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about. People who know the least always argue the most. If you look for the positive things in life; you will find them. What we are doing at the moment is more that just one thing added to the rest; it is a memoir. Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes The human mind must believe in something, so why not let it believe what it does believe. He that boasts of his own knowledge proclaims his ignorance It is better to live richly than to die rich. On his examination paper a boy wrote, "A natural death is where you die by yourself without a doctor... Many things are worse than defeat,and compromise with evil is one of them. Desire for security keeps littleness little and threatens the great with smallness. We cannot be too earnest, too persistent, too determined, about living superior to the herd-instinct... A college education never hurt anybody who was willing to learn after he got it. Shortchange your education now and you may be short of change the rest of your life. Mistakes are a great educator when one is honest enough to admit them and willing to learn from them Catch your people doing something right and let them know you appreciate it. Create the kind of climate in your organization where personal growth is expected, recognized and re... Enthusiasm is very good lubrication for the mind. Enthusiasm is that kindling spark which marks the difference between the leaders in every activity a... There are many roads to hate, but envy is the shortest of them all. The only person worth envying is he person who doesn't envy.
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 In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag. 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 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... 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 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