Wystan Hugh Auden Quotes

Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.

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

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Now is the age of anxiety.

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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.

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Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.

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

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You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.

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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

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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

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Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility -- the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.

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

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

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Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

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We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our ''natural'' attitude toward the ''other'' is one of either indifference or hostility.

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Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.

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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

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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.

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May it not be that, just as we 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

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Evil is unspectacular and always human And shares our bed and eats at our own table.

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The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.

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Earth, receive an honored guest William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

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This is the Night Mail crossing the Border Bringing the cheque and the postal order.

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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

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Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.

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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.

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