Wystan Hugh Auden quote: "Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public."

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, th...
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN

The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father h...
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as...
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet dev...
WYSTAN HUGH 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

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

If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
W.H. AUDEN

To make one, there must be two.
W.H. AUDEN

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
W.H. AUDEN

A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish...
W.H. AUDEN

And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can be...
W.H. AUDEN

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W.H. AUDEN

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
W.H. AUDEN

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The realit...
W.H. AUDEN

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I ...
W.H. AUDEN

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shad...
W.H. AUDEN

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog fro...
W.H. AUDEN

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, th...
W.H. AUDEN

The thing has way more value in inspiration than in clean-energy production.
AUDEN SCHENDLER

The most important thing we could do at X Games is reach this generation with a message about climat...
AUDEN SCHENDLER

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future...
W.H. AUDEN

For poetry makes nothing happen.
W.H. AUDEN

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed li...
W.H. AUDEN

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I...
WH AUDEN

Among those whom I like, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all o...
W.H. AUDEN

I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
W.H. AUDEN

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews
Not to be born is the best for man
T...
W.H. AUDEN

A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.
W.H. AUDEN

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
W.H. AUDEN

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, th...
W.H. AUDEN

The friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake;
W.H. AUDEN

Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.
W.H. AUDEN

The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
W.H. AUDEN

Our whole environmental program is organized under the umbrella of climate. Climate change should be...
AUDEN SCHENDLER

Base words are uttered only by the base
And can for such at once be understood;
But noble ...
W.H. AUDEN

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
W.H. AUDEN

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, ...
W.H. AUDEN

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the o...
W.H. AUDEN

Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false...
W.H. AUDEN

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book rea...
W.H. AUDEN

I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps ov...
W.H. AUDEN

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W.H. AUDEN

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
W.H. AUDEN

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not ...
W.H. AUDEN

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain an...
W.H. AUDEN

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all ...
W.H. AUDEN

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
P...
W.H. AUDEN

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

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) ...
W.H. AUDEN

We must love one another or die
W.H. AUDEN

Thoughts on his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic.
W.H. AUDEN

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep
W.H. AUDEN

There are good books which are only for adults.
There are no good books which are only for chil...
W.H. AUDEN

What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced socie...
W.H. AUDEN

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good ...
W.H. AUDEN

Some companies (buying insurance) may be stunned by how much rates will go up.
JAMES AUDEN

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sl...
W.H. AUDEN

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eye...
W.H. AUDEN

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
W.H. AUDEN

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Para...
W. H. AUDEN

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, consideri...
W. H. AUDEN

All that we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. AUDEN

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a ...
W. H. AUDEN

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. AUDEN

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
W. H. AUDEN

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him ...
W. H. AUDEN

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature...
W. H. AUDEN

Art is born of humiliation.
W. H. AUDEN

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
W. H. AUDEN

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
W. H. AUDEN

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
W. H. AUDEN

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed li...
W. H. AUDEN

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
W. H. AUDEN

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the othe...
W. H. AUDEN

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I ...
W. H. AUDEN

In those whom I like, I can find no common denominator; in those whom I love I can: they all make me...
W. H. AUDEN

Continuing a short series on forgiveness: Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. ("To know all i...
W. H. AUDEN

All theological language is necessarily analogical, but it was singularly unfortunate that the Churc...
W. H. AUDEN

Commemoration of Cecile Isherwood, Founder of the Community of the Resurrection, Grahamstown, South ...
W. H. AUDEN

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. AUDEN

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Par...
W. H. AUDEN

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. AUDEN

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. AUDEN

We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
W H AUDEN

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich ma...
W. H. AUDEN

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and...
W. H. AUDEN

Eagerly, musician,Sweep your string,So we may sing,Elated, optative,Our several voicesInterblending,...
W. H. AUDEN

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. AUDEN

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the oth...
W. H. AUDEN

You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.
W. H. AUDEN

We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
W. H. AUDEN

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a s...
W. H. AUDEN

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mist...
W. H. AUDEN

In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it b...
W. H. AUDEN

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A c...
W. H. AUDEN

Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinkin...
W. H. AUDEN

Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of charac...
W. H. AUDEN

It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say,...
W. H. AUDEN

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life ...
W. H. AUDEN

Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are sha...
W. H. AUDEN

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. AUDEN

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. AUDEN

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who cl...
W. H. AUDEN

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrat...
W. H. AUDEN

There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them...
W. H. AUDEN

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a s...
W. H. AUDEN

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible...
W. H. AUDEN

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am fr...
W. H. AUDEN

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
W. H. AUDEN

It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which...
W. H. AUDEN

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'l...
W. H. AUDEN

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
W. H. AUDEN

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. ...
W. H. AUDEN

We must love one another or die.
W. H. AUDEN

We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country becaus...
W. H. AUDEN

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
W. H. AUDEN

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for...
W. H. AUDEN

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich ma...
W. H. AUDEN

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
W. H. AUDEN

What people don't realize is that intimacy has its conventions as well as ordinary social intercours...
W. H. AUDEN

Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefe...
W. H. AUDEN

The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life...
W. H. AUDEN

How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so hig...
W. H. AUDEN

Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a f...
W. H. AUDEN

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. AUDEN

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in...
W. H. AUDEN

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual s...
W. H. AUDEN

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. AUDEN

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I ...
W. H. AUDEN

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. AUDEN

If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willful...
W. H. AUDEN

The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when ...
W. H. AUDEN

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. AUDEN

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of...
W. H. AUDEN

It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself...
W. H. AUDEN

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scien...
W. H. AUDEN

Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their trivial...
W. H. AUDEN

God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of ho...
W. H. AUDEN

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to...
W. H. AUDEN

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
W. H. AUDEN

Funeral Blues

W. H. AUDEN

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so con...
W. H. AUDEN

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. AUDEN

Healing, Papa would tell me, is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.
W. H. AUDEN

And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to ...
W. H. AUDEN

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, th...
W. H. AUDEN

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular c...
W. H. AUDEN

It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people b...
W. H. AUDEN

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
W. H. AUDEN

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, consideri...
W. H. AUDEN

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
W. H. AUDEN

Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would cal...
W. H. AUDEN

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, ...
W. H. AUDEN

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet dev...
W. H. AUDEN

Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to...
W. H. AUDEN

Cancer is a curious thing...
Nobody knows what the cause is,
Though some pretend they do;
I...
W. H. AUDEN

I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make ...
W. H. AUDEN

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his...
W. H. AUDEN

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.
W. H. AUDEN

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their aff...
W. H. AUDEN

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption....
W. H. AUDEN

You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
W. H. AUDEN

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a m...
W. H. AUDEN

A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good ...
W. H. AUDEN

But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided.
A continent for better or worse divided. W. H. AUDEN

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all ...
W. H. AUDEN

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they s...
W. H. AUDEN

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the ...
W. H. AUDEN

The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father h...
W. H. AUDEN

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
W. H. AUDEN

The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in ...
W. H. AUDEN

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most pa...
W. H. AUDEN

Criticism should be a casual conversation.
W. H. AUDEN

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will...
W. H. AUDEN

Now is the age of anxiety.
W. H. AUDEN

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the ot...
W. H. AUDEN

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
W H AUDEN

It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in whi...
W. H. AUDEN

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
W. H. AUDEN

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
W. H. AUDEN

A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.
W. H. AUDEN

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. AUDEN

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the m...
W. H. AUDEN

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
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

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

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as...
W. H. AUDEN

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology ...
W. H. AUDEN

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into ...
W. H. AUDEN

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, ...
W. H. AUDEN

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
W. H. AUDEN

To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. AUDEN

No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. AUDEN

False enchantment can last a lifetime.
W. H. AUDEN

Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. AUDEN

Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

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Wystan Hugh Auden

Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

Wystan Hugh Auden

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