Quotes by W. H. Auden

“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.”

“'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'”

“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.”

“A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.”

“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”

“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”

“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”

“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”

“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”

“Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”

“I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.”

“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”

“Now is the age of anxiety.”

“History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”

“May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Hi...”

“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”

“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”

“In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.”

“Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however p...”

“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which...”