All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 3
A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 1
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 1
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich. W. H. Auden English Poet More W. H. Auden Quotes 0