Quotes by Auden, W. H.

"The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age."

Auden, W. H. on age and aging
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"In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure."

Auden, W. H. on action
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"A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own."

Auden, W. H. on doctors
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"A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish."

Auden, W. H. on dream
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"Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table."

Auden, W. H. on evil
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"America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an ?lite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment."

Auden, W. H. on experts
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"The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition."

Auden, W. H. on eyes
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"My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain."

Auden, W. H. on faces
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"Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility -- the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past."

Auden, W. H. on faces
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"May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that faith is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?"

Auden, W. H. on faith
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"Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud."

Auden, W. H. on fame
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"Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality."

Auden, W. H. on friends and friendship
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"No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games."

Auden, W. H. on games
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"Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do."

Auden, W. H. on genius
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"The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth."

Auden, W. H. on america
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"God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich."

Auden, W. H. on america
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"God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word."

Auden, W. H. on god
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"One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell."

Auden, W. H. on hell
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"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."

Auden, W. H. on humor
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"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."

Auden, W. H. on intelligence and intellectuals
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"What people don't realize is that intimacy has its conventions as well as ordinary social intercourse. 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."

Auden, W. H. on intimacy
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"It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful."

Auden, W. H. on leisure
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"The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen."

Auden, W. H. on acting and actors
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"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."

Auden, W. H. on literature
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"We must love one another or die."

Auden, W. H. on love
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"We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our natural attitude toward the other is one of either indifference or hostility."

Auden, W. H. on love
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"A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime."

Auden, W. H. on love
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"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."

Auden, W. H. on marriage
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"How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe."

Auden, W. H. on mathematics
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"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."

Auden, W. H. on men
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"The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories."

Auden, W. H. on men
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"The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind."

Auden, W. H. on mind
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"Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest."

Auden, W. H. on murder
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"It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen."

Auden, W. H. on murder
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"A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become."

Auden, W. H. on music
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"Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable."

Auden, W. H. on names
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"The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears."

Auden, W. H. on new year
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"No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible."

Auden, W. H. on opera
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"If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni."

Auden, W. H. on opera
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"Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return."

Auden, W. H. on patience
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