WAW.H. Auden

142 collected words

W.H. Auden

Life dates: 1907 AD — 1973 AD

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01c. 1920 AD

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

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02c. 1920 AD

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

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03c. 1920 AD

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

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04c. 1920 AD

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

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05c. 1920 AD

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

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06c. 1920 AD

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

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07c. 1920 AD

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

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08c. 1920 AD

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

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09c. 1920 AD

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

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10c. 1920 AD

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.

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11c. 1920 AD

Now is the age of anxiety.

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12c. 1920 AD

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

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13c. 1920 AD

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?

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14c. 1920 AD

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

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15c. 1920 AD

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

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16c. 1920 AD

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

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17c. 1920 AD

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.

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18c. 1920 AD

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.

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19c. 1920 AD

Art is born of humiliation.

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20c. 1920 AD

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.

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21c. 1920 AD

It is 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.

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22c. 1920 AD

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

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