Quotes from W. H. Auden

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

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

Does God judge us by appearances? I Suspect that He does.

A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.

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

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.

No being can make another one happy.

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

We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them - the one, in fact, which is not a mask.

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.

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

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

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

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

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

The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.

The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.

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.

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

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

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they've realised they can't get away with it.