Quotes from W. H. Auden

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.

If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.

Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.

Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

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?

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

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.

Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.

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

Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself.

A shilling life will give you all the facts.

In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning... In life the loser's score is always zero.

From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.

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.

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

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

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.

Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.

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 defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.

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

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?