Quotes from W. H. Auden

We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock

Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes i do not like my work On a pink official form.

Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral

The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.

Definition of a College professor: someone who talks in other people's sleep.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.

Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us. Once we had a country and we thought it fair, Look in the atlas and you'll find it there: We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

Hunger allows no choice.

To ask the hard question is simple, The simple act of the confused will.

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. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

Let us honour if we can The vertical man Though we value none But the horizontal one.

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.

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

I am beginning to lose patience With my personal relations. They are not deep And they are not cheap.

And we are introduced to Goodness every day, Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults; He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect, But wears a stammer like a decoration.

In life the loser's score is always zero.

The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing?

All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie.