457 Quotes by W. H. Auden

A shilling life will give you all the facts.

Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.

In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning... In life the loser's score is always zero.

To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.

Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.

An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.

Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ''shaggy dog'' stories; they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.