131 quotes
If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity — every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Most works of art are, necessarily, bad...; one suffers through the many for the few.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
For if you truly believe in the omniscience and omnipresence of the Lord, then surely are we not always in His presence.
Auden is able to set up a We (whom he identifies himself with — rejection loves company) in opposition to the enemy They...
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
A good religious poem, today, is ambergris, and it is hard to enjoy it for thinking of all those suffering whales; but martyrs are born, not made.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
If wishes were stories, beggars would read...
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that “the way it really was” half the time is, and half the time isn’t, the way it ought to be in the novel.
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
One is forced to remember how far from "self-expression" great poems are — what a strange compromise between the demands of the self, the world, and Poetry they actually represent.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
This sort of admission of error, of change, makes us trust a critic as nothing else but omniscience could...
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.
Most people don’t listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By...
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
We never step twice into the same Auden. — HERACLITUS
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Oscar Williams’s new book is pleasanter and a little quieter than his old, which gave the impression of having been written on a typewriter by a typewriter.
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)
The usual bad poem in somebody’s Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one’s teeth.
Poetry and the Age (1953)
Somewhere there must be
Something that's different from everything.
All that I've never thought of — think of me!
The Seven-League Crutches (1951)
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Times (1993)
People had always seemed to Gertrude rather like the beasts in Animal Farm: all equally detestable, but some more equally detestable than others...
Pictures from an Institution (1954)
When we read what Goethe says about men we are ashamed of what we have said; when we read what he says about painting and statues we are ashamed of what Goethe has said.
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)