451 Quotes by W.H. Auden

Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.

The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists.

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 small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going to smash; They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods. A culture is no better than its woods.

How happy is 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.

I don’t get acting jobs because of my looks.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.