451 Quotes by W.H. Auden

Dear little not-so-innocents, beware ofOld Grandmother Spider: rump her endearments – She’s not quite as nice as She looks, nor you quiteas tough as you think.

The songs celebrates the order of the nature. When the scene is nice, the emotion are nasty, when the scene is nasty, the emotion are nice.

An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

And none will hear the postman’s knockWithout a quickening of the heart.For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.