W. H. Auden Quotes & Sayings (Page 6)

“A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.”

“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”

“The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.”

“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.”

“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 society has a direct interest.”

“The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.”

“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.”

“A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.”

“The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.”

“Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.”