Quote

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

W. H. Auden

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
Composer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Time
Race
Abandoned
Age
Birthday
Society
Distinction
Less
Aging
Money
Proper
Happens
Democratic
Distinctions
Stills
Happen
Hymns
Still
Class
Rank

More quotes by W. H. Auden

Image
To ask the hard question is simple.
W. H. Auden
Image
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
W. H. Auden
Image
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.
W. H. Auden
Image
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
Image
To save your world you asked this man to die would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. Auden
Image
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
Image
Good can imagine Evil but Evil cannot imagine Good.
W. H. Auden
Image
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
W. H. Auden
Image
Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.
W. H. Auden
Image
Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
W. H. Auden
Image
I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
W. H. Auden
Image
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
Image
The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.
W. H. Auden
Image
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
W. H. Auden
Image
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W. H. Auden
Image
A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
W. H. Auden
Image
To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however good I may become, remains unchanged.
W. H. Auden
Image
The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.
W. H. Auden
Image
Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.
W. H. Auden
Image
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