Quote

A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothingto increase it what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?

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
American
Inherited
Less
Latter
Take
Guilty
Feels
Guilt
Increase
Drink
Wealth
Poor
Psychoanalysis

More quotes by W. H. Auden

Image
Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
W. H. Auden
Image
Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
W. H. Auden
Image
The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
W. H. Auden
Image
Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.
W. H. Auden
Image
Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.
W. H. Auden
Image
We who must die demand a miracle. How could the Eternal do a temporal act, The Infinite become a finite fact? Nothing can save us that is possible: We who must die demand a miracle.
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
Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
W. H. Auden
Image
Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.
W. H. Auden
Image
To be free is often to be lonely.
W. H. Auden
Image
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
W. H. Auden
Image
All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: I refuse to be what I am.
W. H. Auden
Image
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
W. H. Auden
Image
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
W. H. Auden
Image
Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
W. H. Auden
Image
The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
W. H. Auden
Image
O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.
W. H. Auden
Image
You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
W. H. Auden
Image
There is no love There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
W. H. Auden
Image
All I have is a voice.
W. H. Auden