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It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
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
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
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You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
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To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
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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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If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water.
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What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
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A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
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The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.
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Alone, alone, about the dreadful wood / Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, / Dreading to find its Father.
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Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one
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By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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Water is the soul of the Earth.
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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.
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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.
W. H. Auden
Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded.
W. H. Auden
To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith
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Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.
W. H. Auden
In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
W. H. Auden
Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.
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Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.
W. H. Auden
