Quote

It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.

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
Others
Sensitivity
Cannot
Contradiction
Self
Sensitive
Time
Vices
Think
Aware
Axiomatic
Thinking
Conscious
Insensitivity
People
Example
Insensitive
Virtue
Dealings

More quotes by W. H. Auden

Image
Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
W. H. Auden
Image
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden
Image
A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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
I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
W. H. Auden
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Organic growth is a cyclical process it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.
W. H. Auden
Image
Love each other or perish.
W. H. Auden
Image
Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
W. H. Auden
Image
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
W. H. Auden
Image
Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.
W. H. Auden
Image
We must love one another or die
W. H. Auden
Image
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
Image
All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: 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
Image
Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
W. H. Auden
Image
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
W. H. Auden
Image
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
Image
To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.
W. H. Auden
Image
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. Auden