457 Quotes by W. H. Auden

Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough; Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.

It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.

Life is a picnic on a precipice.

The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.

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

Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; whatfrom the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.

In life the loser's score is always zero.

If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.

We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock