Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.
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
Government
Assured
Ever
Complete
Mean
Choice
Time
Choices
Moral
Clashing
Freedom
Ideally
Individual
Prevented
Means
Wills
More quotes by W. H. Auden
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
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
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
W. H. Auden
Words are for those with promises to keep.
W. H. Auden
When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
W. H. Auden
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
W. H. Auden
The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
W. H. Auden
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
W. H. Auden
To ask the hard question is simple.
W. H. Auden
Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
W. H. Auden
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
W. H. Auden
A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
W. H. Auden
Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.
W. H. Auden
Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
W. H. Auden
Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.
W. H. Auden
Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one
W. H. Auden
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
W. H. Auden
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another...
W. H. Auden
I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.
W. H. Auden
One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.
W. H. Auden
