457 Quotes by W. H. Auden

Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?

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.

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

O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

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.

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.