Quote

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

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
Thinking
Mystical
Ego
Disappear
Language
Experience
Power
Doe
Think
Disappears

More quotes by W. H. Auden

Image
Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.
W. H. Auden
Image
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
W. H. Auden
Image
I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
W. H. Auden
Image
Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
W. H. Auden
Image
Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
W. H. Auden
Image
An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
W. H. Auden
Image
Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.
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
But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer writer for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer poetry would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
W. H. Auden
Image
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
W. H. Auden
Image
The closest modern equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot.
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
Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.
W. H. Auden
Image
As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
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
Beloved, we are always in the wrong, Handling so clumsily our stupid lives, Suffering too little or too long, Too careful even in our selfish loves: The decorative manias we obey Die in grimaces round us every day, Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice Which utters an absurd command - Rejoice.
W. H. Auden
Image
Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.
W. H. Auden
Image
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
W. H. Auden
Image
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
W. H. Auden
Image
There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?
W. H. Auden