W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Audenwas an English poet, who later became an American citizen. He is best known for love poems such as "Funeral Blues," poems on political and social themes such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles," poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae." He was born in York, grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth21 February 1907
discovery wish important
One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.
discovery meaning-of-life recognition
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.
technique crafts sincerity
Sincerity is technique.
curate full room science shabby
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.
art culture earn fact money poet practicing sad talking
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.
english-poet
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
voice
All I have is a voice.
pay-the-price people use
People always get what they want. But there is a price for everything. Failures are either those who do not know what they want or are not prepared to pay the price asked them. The price varies from individual to individual. Some get things at bargain-sale prices, others only at famine prices. But it is no use grumbling. Whatever price you are asked, you must pay.
games class action
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
change growth religion
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.
love motivational strength
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
men dead-man rate
A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.
insane world facts
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.
pay told-you-so if-i-could
Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.