Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.
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
Starving
Founders
Image
Sorrow
Honor
Whose
Cities
Starvation
More quotes by W. H. Auden
The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
W. H. Auden
The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
W. H. Auden
I will love you forever swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday - Is that still as easy?
W. H. Auden
If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
W. H. Auden
An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
W. H. Auden
Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
W. H. Auden
Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won't believe again in their own size.
W. H. Auden
Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
W. H. Auden
There are three cardinal rules - don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.
W. H. Auden
The stars are not wanted now, put out every one Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun.
W. H. Auden
Water is the soul of the Earth.
W. H. Auden
Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
W. H. Auden
Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
W. H. Auden
Words are for those with promises to keep.
W. H. Auden
Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.
W. H. Auden
A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.
W. H. Auden
Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.
W. H. Auden
There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.
W. H. Auden