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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters How well they understood Its human position how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

W. H. Auden

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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
Place
Understood
Someone
Walking
Wells
Along
Dully
Human
Position
Opening
Humans
Takes
Window
Well
Suffering
Sorrow
Never
Wrong
Masters
Else
Eating

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Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
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Long ago the accusations had begun, And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged
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When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
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It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
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Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
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The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
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America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
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Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
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Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.
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May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
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Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
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In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
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The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
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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.
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