217 quotes
To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
The Shield of Achilles (1955)
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible, it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970)
Let us honor if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
Poems (1933)
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
The Shield of Achilles (1955)
To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion.
Another Time (1940)
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
Homage to Clio (1960)
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
Another Time (1940)
In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments.
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)
All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.
A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970)
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)
You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.
The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (1991)
Criticism should be a casual conversation.
The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (1991)
Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: 'memorable speech'.
introduction to The Poet's Tongue (1935)
A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.
Epistle to a Godson, and Other Poems (1972)
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)