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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden
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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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More quotes by W. H. Auden
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
W. H. Auden
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
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You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
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Good can imagine Evil but Evil cannot imagine Good.
W. H. Auden
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden
Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.
W. H. Auden
There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
W. H. Auden
To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
W. H. Auden
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W. H. Auden
All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: I refuse to be what I am.
W. H. Auden
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. Auden
When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
W. H. Auden
Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.
W. H. Auden
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
W. H. Auden
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
W. H. Auden
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
W. H. Auden
As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
W. H. Auden
You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.
W. H. Auden
It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
W. H. Auden
