Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W. H. Auden
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Personality
Trouble
Times
Character
Precocious
Think
Personalities
Thinking
Backward
Troubles
Characters
More quotes by W. H. Auden
To ask the hard question is simple.
W. H. Auden
Let all your thinks be thanks.
W. H. Auden
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
W. H. Auden
Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
W. H. Auden
Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
W. H. Auden
Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
W. H. Auden
A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.
W. H. Auden
Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.
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
Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offence from luther untill noe that has driven a culture mad. From what occured at linz what huge imago made a psychopathic god. i and the public know what all schoolchildren learn those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
W. H. Auden
Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.
W. H. Auden
For time is inches And the heart's changes, Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.
W. H. Auden
There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police We must love one another or die.
W. H. Auden
Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.
W. H. Auden
To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
W. H. Auden
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
W. H. Auden
Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?
W. H. Auden
Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
W. H. Auden
a culture is no better than its woods
W. H. Auden
An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.
W. H. Auden
