W. H. Auden Quotes - 9quotes.com

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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.
Written by W. H. Auden
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.
Written by W. H. Auden
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
Written by W. H. Auden
Now is the age of anxiety.
Written by W. H. Auden
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
Written by W. H. Auden
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
Written by W. H. Auden
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
Written by W. H. Auden
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.
Written by W. H. Auden
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.
Written by W. H. Auden
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
Written by W. H. Auden
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
Written by W. H. Auden
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
Written by W. H. Auden
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.
Written by W. H. Auden
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
Written by W. H. Auden
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
Written by W. H. Auden
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
Written by W. H. Auden
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.
Written by W. H. Auden
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.
Written by W. H. Auden
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
Written by W. H. Auden
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
Written by W. H. Auden
No hero is mortal till he dies.
Written by W. H. Auden
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
Written by W. H. Auden
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
Written by W. H. Auden
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
Written by W. H. Auden
It's 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.
Written by W. H. Auden
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.
Written by W. H. Auden
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
Written by W. H. Auden
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
Written by W. H. Auden
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.
Written by W. H. Auden
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
Written by W. H. Auden

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