Quotes By W. H. Auden

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

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.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

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.

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

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

Now is the age of anxiety.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

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.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

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.

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.

It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

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

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

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.

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

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

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

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?