God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: God
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?
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Faith
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Letters
Now is the age of anxiety.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Anxiety
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Death
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Eyes
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.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Religion
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Literature, Books
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.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Poetry
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: The Mind, Mind
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Past, History
see without looking, … hear without listening, … breathe without asking.
—W. H. Auden
Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Behavior, Manners
What people don’t realize is that intimacy has its conventions as well as ordinary social intercourse. There are three cardinal rules—don’t take somebody else’s boyfriend unless you’ve been specifically invited to do so, don’t take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Men & Women
To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Happiness
I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a “suspension of belief.” A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Poets, Poetry
The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Faith, Belief
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.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Authors & Writing, Wishes, Writers
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Quotations
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Reading, Books
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Music
The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Criticism, Critics
Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Goodness
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.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Government, Age
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Service, Life
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Marriage
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Health, Medicine
If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brunnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Opera
A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Love
I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.
—W. H. Auden
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Alfred Hitchcock British-born American Film Director
- Cary Grant British-American Film Actor
- William Butler Yeats Irish Poet
- T. S. Eliot American-born British Poet
- A. E. Housman English Scholar, Poet
- Theodore Roethke American Poet
- Robert Penn Warren American Novelist, Poet
- Annie Besant British-born Indian Theosophist
- Beryl Markham English-African Aviator
- John Gay English Poet, Dramatist
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