Quote

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

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
Facts
Miracle
Become
Save
Nothing
Infinite
Must
Demand
Eternal
Possible
Dies
Temporal
Fact
Finite

More quotes by W. H. Auden

Image
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden
Image
Like love we don't know where or why Like love we cant compel or fly Like Love we often weep Like Love we seldom keep
W. H. Auden
Image
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
W. H. Auden
Image
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden
Image
A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
W. H. Auden
Image
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
W. H. Auden
Image
Good can imagine Evil but Evil cannot imagine Good.
W. H. Auden
Image
All pity is self-pity.
W. H. Auden
Image
It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, What should I write at the age of sixty-four, but never, What should I write in 1940.
W. H. Auden
Image
Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.
W. H. Auden
Image
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
Image
An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.
W. H. Auden
Image
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
W. H. Auden
Image
There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?
W. H. Auden
Image
A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
W. H. Auden
Image
We are all here on earth to help others what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
W. H. Auden
Image
All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.
W. H. Auden
Image
Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred without Science, we should always worship false gods.
W. H. Auden
Image
Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes i do not like my work On a pink official form.
W. H. Auden
Image
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W. H. Auden