W H Auden Quotes

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

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

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

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.

Sincerity is technique.

Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.

Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

To be free is often to be lonely.

Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say

It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

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

Let all your thinks be thanks.

Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

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

I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.

There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

The lights must never go out, The music must always play

No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.

The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.

Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.