“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.”
Relationship
“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”
DeathAll Quotes by W. H. Auden
“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”
Health“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.”
Forgiveness“The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.”
Age“Art is born of humiliation.”
Art“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
Music“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.”
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.”
Art“A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.”
Teacher“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
Art“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.”
Marriage“Learn from your dreams what you lack.”
Dreams“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?”
Faith“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”
Death“History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”
History“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”
Travel“Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”
Poetry“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
Death“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.”
Science“Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”
Music