W. H. Auden

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.

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

In relation to a writer most readers believe in the Double Standard they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like but he must never never be unfaithful to them.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

Evil is unspectacular and always human and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

Swans in the winter air A white perfection have

The ear tends to be lazy craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected the eye on the other hand tends to be impatient craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that ent hralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

Water is the soul of the Earth.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

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

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

Now is the age of anxiety.

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets some gourmands and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole absent mindedly and with little relish.

It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.

In headaches and in worry vaguely life leaks away And time will have his fancy tomorrow or today.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.

Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance Dance Dance till you drop.

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

Among those whom I like or admire I can find no common denominator but among those whom I love I can all of them make me laugh.

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

Art is born of humiliation.

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.