457 Quotes by W. H. Auden

Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

Let all your thinks be thanks.

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them -- the one, in fact, which is not a mask.