W. H. Auden
If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.Collection: Soul
I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.Collection: Discovery
The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they've realised they can't get away with it.Collection: Ideas
The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.Collection: Taken
The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.Collection: Gentleman
There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.Collection: Thinking
Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.Collection: Luxury
It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."Collection: Writing
If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.Collection: Queens
We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our natural attitude toward the other is one of either indifference or hostility.Collection: Love
Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.Collection: Science
Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.Collection: Song
Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.Collection: Funny
Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.Collection: Curious
The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientistsCollection: Men
Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.Collection: Writing
A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.Collection: May
There’s always another story. There’s more than meets the eye.Collection: Stories
We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is beyond me.Collection: Helping Others
Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?Collection: Firsts
There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that, as a rule, a poet should read them.Collection: Firsts