W. H. Auden
poet, screenwriter, literary historian, playwright, writer, librettist, university teacher, literary critic, essayist, composer, translator
Read on Wikipedia1907 – 1973
All Quotes by W. H. Auden
“In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.”
“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
“He was my North, my South, my East and West,”
“Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.”
“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”
“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.”
“We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.”
“Now is the age of anxiety.”
“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”
“'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'”
“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”
“We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.”
“Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”
“Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.”
“He was my North, my South, my East and West,”
“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”
“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.”
“History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”
“Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.”
“Learn from your dreams what you lack.”
“All the rest is silence”