Quotes from W. H. Auden

Now is the age of anxiety.

To us he is no more a personNow but a whole climate of opinion.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeatedMay say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

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

Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are shaggy dog stories; they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.

False enchantment can last a lifetime.

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.

There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, Did you get an erection? If the answer is Yes from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

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

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

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.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.

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

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

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

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.

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, as surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear that same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.