451 Quotes by W.H. Auden

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

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.

When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can’t help wishing the iconoclasts had won.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.

With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse.

The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.

It is nonsense to speak of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures. To a hungry man it is, rightly, more important that he eat than that he philosophize.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.