W. H. Auden
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?Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Valentines
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.Collection: History
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.Collection: Society
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.Collection: Poetry
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Relationship
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Faith
Art is born of humiliation.Collection: Art
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.Collection: Art
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.Collection: Happiness
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.Collection: Death
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Sad
Now is the age of anxiety.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Food
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Sad
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.Collection: Marriage
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.Collection: Poetry
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.Collection: Best
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.Collection: Love
Learn from your dreams what you lack.Collection: Dreams
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.Collection: Music
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'Collection: Nature
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Experience
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.Collection: Health
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.Collection: Funny
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.Collection: Teacher
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
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.
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
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.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.