Quotes By W. H. Auden

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

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

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.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

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?

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.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

Art is born of humiliation.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.