Quotes By Wilfred Owen

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

When I begin to eliminate from the list all those professions which are impossible from a financial point of view and then those which I feel disinclined to-it leaves nothing.

Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.

Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.

She is elegant rather than belle.

All a poet can do today is warn.

The war effects me less than it ought. I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter.

I don't ask myself, is the life congenial to me? But, am I fitted for, am I called to, the Ministry?

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

If I have got to be a soldier, I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable.

I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet's.

All I ask is to be held above the barren wastes of want.

After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.

Be bullied, be outraged, by killed, but do not kill.

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.

I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.

Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.

Ambition may be defined as the willingness to receive any number of hits on the nose.

All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.

Flying is the only active profession I would ever continue with enthusiasm after the War.