“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”
Health
“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.”
ScienceAll Quotes by W. H. Auden
“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.”
Art“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“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“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
Music“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
Art“Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”
Music“A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.”
Teacher“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“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.”
Experience“Now is the age of anxiety.”
Age“A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
Art“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“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“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.”
Love“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“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.”
Art“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
Love“Learn from your dreams what you lack.”
Dreams“Art is born of humiliation.”
Art