W.H. Auden

We are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know.

— W.H. Auden

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.

— W.H. Auden

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

— W.H. Auden

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.

— W.H. Auden

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

— W.H. Auden

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

— W.H. Auden

I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?

— W.H. Auden

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

— W.H. Auden

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

— W.H. Auden

O stand, stand at the window

— W.H. Auden

Say this city has ten million souls,

— W.H. Auden

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

— W.H. Auden

Follow, poet, follow right

— W.H. Auden

Defenceless under the night

— W.H. Auden

Poetry makes nothing happen.

— W.H. Auden

Base words are uttered only by the base

— W.H. Auden