Quotes by W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden

American poet

Lived from: 1907 - 1973

Category: Poets (Contemporary)

Quotes 1 till 20 of 70.

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  • ''God is Love,'' we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
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  • All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
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  • ''Healing,'' Papa would tell me, ''is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.''
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  • A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
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  • A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
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  • A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.
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  • A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
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  • A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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  • 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.
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  • A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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  • 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.
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  • America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
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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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  • Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
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  • As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.
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  • Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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  • Criticism should be a casual conversation.
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  • Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ''shaggy dog'' stories; they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.
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  • Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
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  • Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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Questions and Answers

What are the most famous quotes from W. H. Auden?

The two most famous quotes from W. H. Auden are:

  • "''God is Love,'' we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word."
  • "All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation."

When did W. H. Auden live?

W. H. Auden was born in 1907 and died in the year 1973.