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A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
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
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W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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More quotes by W. H. Auden
Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
W. H. Auden
I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.
W. H. Auden
There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ''Did you get an erection?'' If the answer is ''Yes'' from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.
W. H. Auden
Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.
W. H. Auden
If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water.
W. H. Auden
Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
W. H. Auden
Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. Auden
What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.
W. H. Auden
The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.
W. H. Auden
To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
W. H. Auden
And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
W. H. Auden
The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
W. H. Auden
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
W. H. Auden
Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
W. H. Auden
The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
W. H. Auden
No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
W. H. Auden
The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
W. H. Auden
A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
W. H. Auden
In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
W. H. Auden
We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.
W. H. Auden
