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Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
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
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
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Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
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Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
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Sincerity is technique.
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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.
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Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
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In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
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We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
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Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.
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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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Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
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To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith
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What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
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To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
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No being can make another one happy.
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
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Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
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Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.
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The poet who writes free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
W. H. Auden
