Famous Quotes by Anglo-American Poet W. H. Auden

Now is the age of anxiety.

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

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.

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.

Art is born of humiliation.

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

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.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

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.

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.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

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

History is strictly speaking the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

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.

I’ll love you dear I’ll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.

Of all possible subjects travel is the most difficult for an artist as it is the easiest for a journalist.

I’ll love you dear I’ll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.