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W. H. Auden Quotes - Page 10

All Quotes Acting Affection Age Art Character Children Choices Cooking Country Criticism Culture Dance Dancing Death Desire Drama Earth Ego Evil Fate Fear Feelings Food Funeral Funny Giving God Greek Grief Happiness Healing Heart Hell Helping Others History Homosexuality Honor Hope Hunger Imagination Inspirational Joy Judgment Language Life Listening Love Lying Mankind Money Mountain Mourning Music Nature Passion Past Pleasure Poetry Politics Prayer Quality Reality Religion Running Science Silence Sin Sleep Sorrow Soul Study Success Suffering Time Today Torture Waiting Water Winning Work Writing

You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.

You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.

Relationship, Beauty, Differences

Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.

Sensual, Wish, Desire

The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.

Funny, New Year, Holiday

"Happy New Year" by Ligaya Mishan, www.newyorker.com. December 29, 200.

As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.

Healing, Unjust, Pleasure

If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.

Believe, Wicked, Age

It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.

Stupid, Long, People

Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.

Past, Men, History

Dyer's Hand (1963) "D. H. Lawrence"

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

Hell, Assembly, Factories

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

Art, Winning, Drunk

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Looks, Crafts, Leap

All pity is self-pity.

Self, Self Pity, Pity

"The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Interlude: West's Disease"), (p. 243), 1962.

Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.

Our World, Body, Claims

Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.

Faces, Wiser

'Orators' (1932) dedication

Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.

Language, Metaphorical, Humans

Words are for those with promises to keep.

Promise

What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

Poet, Said, Reader

The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.

Men, Hands, Doe

"August 1968". Poem by W. H. Auden,

One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.

Discovery, Wish, Important

The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

Dirty, Writing, Islands

"The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Writing"), (p. 22), 1962.

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.

Prayer, Unique, Class

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.

Dog, Missing, Religion

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, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.

Beautiful, Eye, Expression

Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.

Blessed, Self, Force

A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.

Art, Creativity, Desire

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.

Life, Believe, Writing

Dyer's Hand (1963) "Writing"

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