Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock
W. H. Auden
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Labor
Conscious
Duty
Shadowed
Days
Weep
Wrong
Clock
Done
Till
Must
Sing
Work
Devil
More quotes by W. H. Auden
The stars are dead. The animals will not look: We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
W. H. Auden
I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
W. H. Auden
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
In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or today.
W. H. Auden
Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.
W. H. Auden
Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
W. H. Auden
Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
W. H. Auden
Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
W. H. Auden
You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.
W. H. Auden
The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.
W. H. Auden
Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
W. H. Auden
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. Auden
The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
W. H. Auden
Drama is based on the Mistake.
W. H. Auden
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
W. H. Auden
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
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
W. H. Auden
All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.
W. H. Auden
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
