451 Quotes by W.H. Auden

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself...

Love each other or perish.

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.

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

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; How well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

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

The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.