W.H. Auden Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drumBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overheadScribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;For nothing now can ever come to any good. Another Time

2. Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts. Collected Poems

3. If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.

4. If you want romance, fuck a journalist. Acting Up

5. The More Loving OneLooking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast.How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return?If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.Admirer as I think I amOf stars that do not give a damn,I cannot, now I see them, sayI missed one terribly all day.Were all stars to disappear or die,I should learn to look at an empty skyAnd feel its total dark sublime,Though this might take me a little time. Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957

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

7. We must love one another or die

8. A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II: 1939-1948

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

10. Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded. Collected Poems

11. Defenceless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages:May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame.

12. Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

13. Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise. Another Time

14. From gallery-grave and the hunt of a wren-kingto Low Mass and trailer campis hardly a tick by the carbon clock, but Idon't count that way nor do you:already it is millions of heartbeats agoback to the Bicycle Age,before which is no After for me to measure,j ust a still prehistoric Oncewhere anything could happen. To you, to me,Stonehenge and Chartres Cathedral,the Acropolis, Blenheim, the Albert Memorialare works by the same Old Manunder different names : we know what He did,what, even, He thought He thought,but we don't see why. Selected Poems

15. Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

16. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

17. no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it. The Dyer's Hand

18. O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart. As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks & Other Light Verse

19. Poetry makes nothing happen.

20. Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. New Year Letter

21. Say this city has ten million souls,Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

22. SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night.Accurate scholarship canUnearth the whole offenceFrom Luther until nowThat has driven a culture mad,Find what occurred at Linz,What huge imago madeA psychopathic god:I and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn,Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.Exiled Thucydides knewAll that a speech can sayAbout Democracy,And what dictators do,The elderly rubbish they talkTo an apathetic grave;Analysed all in his book,The enlightenment driven away,The habit-forming pain,Mismanagement and grief:We must suffer them all again.Into this neutral airWhere blind skyscrapers useTheir full height to proclaimThe strength of Collective Man,Each language pours its vainCompetitive excuse:But who can live for longIn an euphoric dream;Out of the mirror they stare,Imperialism's faceAnd the international wrong.Faces along the barCling to their average day:The lights must never go out,The music must always play,All the conventions conspireTo make this fort assumeThe furniture of home;Lest we should see where we are,Lost in a haunted wood,Children afraid of the nightWho have never been happy or good.The windiest militant trashImportant Persons shoutIs not so crude as our wish:What mad Nijinsky wroteAbout DiaghilevIs true of the normal heart;For the error bred in the boneOf each woman and each manCraves what it cannot have,Not universal loveBut to be loved alone.From the conservative darkInto the ethical lifeThe dense commuters come,Repeating their morning vow;'I will be true to the wife,I'll concentrate more on my work,'And helpless governors wakeTo resume their compulsory game:Who can release them now,Who can reach the dead,Who can speak for the dumb?All I have is a voiceTo undo the folded lie,The romantic lie in the brainOf the sensual man-in-the-streetAnd the lie of AuthorityWhose buildings grope the sky:There is no such thing as the StateAnd no one exists alone;Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.Defenseless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages:May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame. Another Time

23. 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. The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955

24. The More Loving OneLooking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast.How should we like it were stars to burnWith a passion for us we could not return?If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.Admirer as I think I amOf stars that do not give a damn,I cannot, now I see them, sayI missed one terribly all day.Were all stars to disappear or die,I should learn to look at an empty skyAnd feel its total dark sublime,Though this might take me a little time. Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957

25. The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.For nothing now can ever come to any good. Selected Poems

26. 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.

27. We live here. We lie in the Present's unopenedSorrow; its limits are what we are.The prisoner ought never to pardon his cell. Journey to a War

28. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

29. Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods. Selected Essays