Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master’s commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too “personal” style.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Slavery
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Genius
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
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
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Hell
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
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Opera
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Laughter, Love, Humor
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.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Media
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Work
Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
—W. H. Auden
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
Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Vanity, Conceit
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
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Books, Reading
A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Love
It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Foresight, Talent
Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Science
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
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
Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Honor
A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Teaching, Education, Teachers
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.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Rest, Leisure
Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Poetry
Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire; it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Cancer
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Theater
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
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: History, Past
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Face, Faces
My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
—W. H. Auden
Topics: Politics
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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