Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible. — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however… — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to… — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
It has been said that a poem should not mean but be. This is not quite accurate. In a poem, as distinct… — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same… — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means;… — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is… — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety. — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible. — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
Why doesn't the United States take over the monarchy and unite with England? England does have important assets. Naturally the longer you wait, the… — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience. — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart. — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as… — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores. — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It… — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell. — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or… — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return. — W. H. Auden Copy Share Image
