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To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

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

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We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
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Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
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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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Words are for those with promises to keep.
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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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We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.
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Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
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Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
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In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes i do not like my work On a pink official form.
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I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
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An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
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The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
W. H. Auden
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A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.
W. H. Auden
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God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
W. H. Auden
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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.
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All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
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Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
W. H. Auden
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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
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Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.
W. H. Auden