I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street. -W. H. Auden Valentinesday
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist. -W. H. Auden Travel
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. -W. H. Auden Science
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. -W. H. Auden Art
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.' -W. H. Auden Science
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. -W. H. Auden Poetry
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. -W. H. Auden Art
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. -W. H. Auden Poetry
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. -W. H. Auden Sad
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods. -W. H. Auden Relationship
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology. -W. H. Auden History
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. -W. H. Auden Poetry
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us? -W. H. Auden History
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us? -W. H. Auden Faith
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. -W. H. Auden Poetry
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. -W. H. Auden Food
