“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
“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
ArtAll Quotes by W. H. Auden
“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”
Death“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
Art“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
Love“A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.”
Teacher“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“Learn from your dreams what you lack.”
Dreams“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
Death“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”
Travel“A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
Art“Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”
Music“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
Music“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“Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”
Best“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“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“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”
Health“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“Art is born of humiliation.”
Art