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W. H. Auden Quotes - Page 11

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

Love each other or perish.

Love each other or perish.

Helping Others, Love Each Other

"Tuesdays with Morrie". Book by Mitch Albom, 1997.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

Art, Believe, Simple

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

Christmas, Friday, Easter

"Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry". Book by Anthony Hecht, p. 135, 2005.

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

Writing, Chance, Lifetime

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

Names, Nicknames

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

Men, Average, Ivory Tower

W H Auden (1981). “Antæus”, Ecco Press

Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond.

Ties, Important, Homosexuality

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

Dog, Children, Men

I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.

Dancing, Grace, Should

We must love one another or die

Love, Philosophy, Educational

"September 1, 1939" l. 88 (1939). In a 1955 printing of the poem Auden changed this to "love one another and die."

To make one, there must be two.

Marriage, Two

Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.

Helping Others, Men, Earth

One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

Unique, Reality, Two

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

Grief, Passion, Men

Organic growth is a cyclical process; it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.

Art, Writing, One Direction

There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?

Art, Desire, Doe

I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone says: 'Whom do you write for?' I reply: 'Do you read me?' If they say 'Yes,' I say, 'Do you like it?' If they say 'No,' then I say, 'I don't write for you.'

Writing, Trying, You Like It

A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

Mother, Writing, Political

"Paris Review", Writers at Work, 4th series, (p. 251), 1972.

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.

Country, Men, Law

Hunger allows no choice.

Choices, Hunger

'September 1, 1939' (1940)

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

Success, Patience, Work

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

Death, War, Men

Shield of Achilles (1955) "Epitaph for the Unknown Soldier"

Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Time, Told You So

Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.

Memories, Faces, Steps

W.H. Auden (2016). “Canción de cuna y otros poemas”, p.35, DEBOLS!LLO

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

Time, Conquer, Before Sunrise

1940 'As I Walked Out One Evening'.

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