Quotes from W. H. Auden

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

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

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.

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

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,Speaking clearly and most severely,Law is as I've told you before,Law is as you know I suppose,Law is but let me explain it once more,Law is The Law.

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

I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odor of deathOffends the September night.

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.

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.

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

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.

And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

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

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?

Art is born of humiliation.

In the nightmare of the darkAll the dogs of Europe bark.

See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.

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

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

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

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

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.

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.