In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate.
Life
AUTHOR QUOTES
Quotes by W.H. Auden
Explore 15 sourced quotes by W.H. Auden. Discover famous, inspirational and timeless words with source information.
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Selected quotes by W.H. Auden
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
Wisdom
Evil is unspectacular and always human And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
Life
No hero is immortal till he dies.
Wisdom
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
Wisdom
To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, Is a keen observer of life, The word “Intellectual” suggests straight away A man who's untrue to his wife.
Life
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen.
Wisdom
No opera plot can be sensible, for in sensible situations people do not sing.
Wisdom
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.
Life
It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
Wisdom
Of course, Behaviorism ‘works.’ So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
Success
To ask the hard question is simple.
Wisdom
Let us honor if we can The vertical man, Though we value none But the horizontal one.
Wisdom
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
Wisdom
All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.
Wisdom