Quotes from W. H. Auden

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

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

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

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

A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.

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

A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.

Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.

Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.

It's 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.

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others; Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.

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

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

Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss

a culture is no better than its woods

Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.