W.H. Auden Quotes

Drama is based on the Mistake.

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded.

I write because I love to play with language.

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

If you want romance, fuck a journalist.

The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.

Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.

After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits his goods and places his life at the Doge’s mercy. […] Shakespeare, it seems to me, was willing to introduce what is an absurd implausibility for the sake of an effect which he could not secure without it: at the last moment when, through his conduct, Shylock has destroyed any sympathy we may have felt for him earlier, we are reminded that, irrespective of his personal character, his status is one of inferiority. A Jew is not regarded, even in law, as a brother.

Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seemAbrupt, untrained, competing with no lieOur fathers shouted once.

The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

All I have is a voice.

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

Small tyrants, threatened by big,sincerely believethey love liberty.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

Any marriage happy or unhappy is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance however passionate.

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

We must love one another or die

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.

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.

In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise

All we are not stares back at what we are.

Nobody can honestly think of himself as a strong character because however successful he may be in overcoming them he is necessarily aware of the doubts and temptations that accompany every important choice.

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.