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Swans in the winter air A white perfection have

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
Air
White
Swans
Winter
Perfection

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A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
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God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
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The lights must never go out, The music must always play
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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.
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Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life
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Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay If I could tell you I would let you know.
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Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
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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.
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The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.
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Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.
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Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
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Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral
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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
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All I have is a voice.
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The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
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The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have Not universal love But to be loved alone.
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A shilling life will give you all the facts.
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