Top 350 W.H. Auden Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.”

— W.H. Auden

102. “Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.”

— W.H. Auden

103. “One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved. Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.”

— W.H. Auden

104. “A shilling life will give you all the facts.”

— W.H. Auden

105. “Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.”

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

107. “Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.”

— W.H. Auden

108. “O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed.”

— W.H. Auden

109. “There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.”

— W.H. Auden

110. “To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.”

— W.H. Auden

111. “The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.”

— W.H. Auden

112. “I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade.”

— W.H. Auden

113. “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”

— W.H. Auden

114. “Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.”

— W.H. Auden

115. “As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.”

— W.H. Auden

116. “Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”

— W.H. Auden

117. “Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.”

— W.H. Auden

Featured in: Romance Quotes

118. “Choice of attention – to pay attention to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.”

— W.H. Auden

119. “All that we are not stares back at what we are.”

— W.H. Auden

120. “All pity is self-pity.”

— W.H. Auden

121. “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”

— W.H. Auden

122. “We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty’s conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock.”

— W.H. Auden

123. “God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.”

— W.H. Auden

124. “To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself...”

— W.H. Auden

125. “Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”

— W.H. Auden

126. “As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption.”

— W.H. Auden

127. “About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.”

— W.H. Auden

128. “Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.”

— W.H. Auden

129. “Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.”

— W.H. Auden

130. “The surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.”

— W.H. Auden

131. “There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.”

— W.H. Auden

132. “Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.”

— W.H. Auden

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

133. “Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.”

— W.H. Auden

134. “To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who’s untrue to his wife.”

— W.H. Auden

135. “To choose what is difficult all one’s days, as if it were easy, that is faith.”

— W.H. Auden

136. “Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams.”

— W.H. Auden

137. “All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.”

— W.H. Auden

138. “My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.”

— W.H. Auden

139. “To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.”

— W.H. Auden

140. “Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.”

— W.H. Auden

141. “Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.”

— W.H. Auden

142. “Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead.”

— W.H. Auden

143. “Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life.”

— W.H. Auden

144. “Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.”

— W.H. Auden

145. “In a tragic contradiction between the normal and the exceptional, there is suffering, in a comic contradiction, none.”

— W.H. Auden

146. “Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.”

— W.H. Auden

147. “Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.”

— W.H. Auden

148. “The lights must never go out, The music must always play.”

— W.H. Auden

149. “Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.”

— W.H. Auden

150. “And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.”

— W.H. Auden