Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by W. H. Auden (British-born American Poet)

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–73,) known as W. H. Auden, was an English-born American poet. He was one of the major poets of the 20th century—he published more than 400 poems, essays, plays, and opera libretti.

Auden’s first volume of poetry, Poems (1930,) written while he was still an undergraduate, established him as the leading voice in a group of young left-wing writers, which included Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Christopher Isherwood. His The Orators (1932,) a volume consisting of odes, parodies of school speeches and sermons, and the surreal “Journal of an Airman,” provided a barrage of satire against England.

Auden traveled widely during the subsequent years. He and Isherwood worked together on a series of plays, such as The Ascent of F6 (1936.) Auden joined the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and wrote Spain (1937.) In 1939, he emigrated to New York, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1946. His writings on religion continued to evolve—his work became increasingly overshadowed by his Christian belief and an existential search for redemption. His long contemplative works include The Double Man (1941,) The Sea and the Mirror (1944,) For the Time Being (1944,) and The Age of Anxiety (1947,) for which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948.

From 1956–61, Auden was a professor of poetry at Oxford University. His poetry adopts many tones, often using colloquial and everyday language. Auden’s Collected Poems was published in 1976.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by W. H. Auden

A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Teachers, Teaching, Education

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.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Science

To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Happiness

Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Men

You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Relationships

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.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Creativity

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Identity, Names

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Imagination

Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility—the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Faces, Explanation, Face

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Children

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Honesty

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Genius

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.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Eyes

In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning. In life, the loser’s score is always zero.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Life

It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Talent, Foresight

Failures either do not know what they want, or jib at the price.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Failure

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Writers, Wishes, Authors & Writing

Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Manners, Behavior

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.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Work

Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire; it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Cancer

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Leadership

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.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Government, Age

We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Change

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for, I don’t know
W. H. Auden
Topics: Life, Service

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.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Men

Between friends, differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Friends, Friendship

To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word “Intellectual” suggests straight away. A man who’s untrue to his wife.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Intelligence

God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
W. H. Auden
Topics: God

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an elite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Experts, Professionalism

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
W. H. Auden
Topics: Love

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