Quotes by W.H. Auden

“We must love one another or die”

“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 forever: I was wrong.”

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

“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die.”

“Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter's waking thoughts.”

“I am sure it is everyones 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 ...”

“If you want romance, fuck a journalist.”

“To make one, there must be two.”

“The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.”

“The friends who met here and embraced are gone,Each to his own mistake;”

“Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.”

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

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

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

“You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.”

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

“We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.”

“Small tyrants, threatened by big,sincerely believethey love liberty.”

“SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I 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 ...”

“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 r...”