W. H. Auden
Warm are the still and lucky miles, White shores of longing stretch away, A light of recognition fills The whole great day, and bright The tiny world of lovers' arms. Silence invades the breathing wood Where drowsy limbs a treasure keep, Now greenly falls the learned shade Across the sleeping brows And stirs their secret to a smile. Restored! Returned! The lost are borne On seas of shipwreck home at last: See! In a fire of praising burns The dry dumb past, and we Our life-day long shall part no more.Collection: Fall
Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.Collection: Sleep
Poetry makes nothing happen.Collection: Poet
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire; Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.Collection: Running
The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake.Collection: Mistake
How happy is the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.Collection: Writing
So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.Collection: Fate
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.Collection: Change
A shilling life will give you all the facts.Collection: Giving
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.Collection: Suffering
When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.Collection: Art
The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.Collection: Men
Time will say nothing but I told you so.Collection: Time
To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.Collection: Art
Alone, alone, about the dreadful wood / Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, / Dreading to find its Father.Collection: Running
Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.Collection: Years
Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead.Collection: Lying
The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.Collection: Sex
All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.Collection: Art
What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.Collection: Symbols
I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.Collection: Thinking
Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.Collection: Believe
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it - not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.Collection: Success
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.Collection: Music
The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.Collection: Language
A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Love
A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.Collection: Dream
Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.Collection: Cat
If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.Collection: Success
Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.Collection: Communication
Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.Collection: Sight
How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.Collection: Stars
The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.Collection: Art
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.Collection: Attention
The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.Collection: Beautiful
Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.Collection: Children
A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.Collection: Insane
Sincerity is technique.Collection: Technique
Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!Collection: Science
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.Collection: Writing
Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.Collection: Firsts
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.Collection: Past
Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.Collection: Fate
The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.Collection: Art
Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.Collection: Remember