Home > Author > W.H. Auden
1 " We must love one another or die "
― W.H. Auden
2 " He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong. "
― W.H. Auden , Collected Poems
3 " If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me. "
4 " Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense. "
5 " The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute. "
― W.H. Auden , Enchafed Flood
6 " Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts. "
7 " Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before. "
8 " You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart. "
9 " A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. "
― W.H. Auden , The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948
10 " We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die. "
― W.H. Auden , The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue
11 " Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise. "
― W.H. Auden , Another Time
12 " O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart. "
― W.H. Auden , As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks & Other Light Verse
13 " Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. "
14 " And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom. "
15 " Poetry makes nothing happen. "
16 " All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all. "
― W.H. Auden , The Sea and the Mirror
17 " 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. "
18 " Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs. "
19 " Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded. "
20 " no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it. "
― W.H. Auden , The Dyer's Hand
