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16 Quotes for 'W. H. Auden' in the Database.
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Letter "W" »
W. H. Auden Quotes
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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.
Topic: Art and Artists
Source: None
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The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
Topic: Body
Source: None
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
Topic: Books
Source: None
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Commemoration of Cecile Isherwood, Founder of the Community of the Resurrection, Grahamstown, South Africa, 1906 Christ did not enchant men; He demanded that they believe in Him: except on one occasion, the Transfiguration. For a brief while, Peter, James, and John were permitted to see Him in His glory. For that brief while they had no need of faith. The vision vanished, and the memory of it did not prevent them from all forsaking Him when He was arrested, or Peter from denying that he had ever known Him.
Topic: Christianity
Source: None
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All theological language is necessarily analogical, but it was singularly unfortunate that the Church, in speaking of punishment for sin, should have chosen the analogy of criminal law, for the analogy is incompatible with the Christian belief in God as the creator of Man. Criminal laws are laws, imposed on men, who are already in existence, with or without their consent, and, with the possible exception of capital punishment for murder, there is no logical relation between the nature of a crime and the penalty inflicted for committing it. If God created man, then the laws of man's spiritual nature must, like the laws of his physical nature, be laws -- laws, that is to say, which he is free to defy but no more free to break than he can break the law of gravity by jumping out of the window, or the laws of biochemistry by getting drunk -- and the consequences of defying them must be as inevitable and as intrinsically related to their nature as a broken leg or a hangover. To state spiritual laws in the imperative -- Thou shalt love God with all thy being, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself -- is simply a pedagogical technique, as when a mother says to her small son, "Stay away from the window!" because the child does not yet know what will happen if he falls out of it.
Topic: Christianity
Source: None
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Continuing a short series on forgiveness: Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. ("To know all is to forgive all.") No commonplace is more untrue. Behavior, whether conditioned by an individual neurosis or by society, can be understood, that is to say, one knows exactly why such and such an individual behaves as he does. But a personal action or deed is always mysterious. When we really act, precisely because it is a matter of free choice, we can never say exactly why we do this rather than that. But it is only deeds that we are required to forgive. If someone does me an injury, the question of forgiveness only arises if I am convinced (a) that the injury he did me was a free act on his part and therefore no less mysterious to him than to me, and (b) that it was me personally whom he meant to injure. Christ does not forgive the soldiers who are nailing him to the Cross; he asks the Father to forgive them. He knows as well as they do why they are doing this -- they are a squad, detailed to execute a criminal. They do not know what they are doing, because it is not their business, as executioners, to know whom they are crucifying. If the person who does me an injury does not know what he is doing, then it is as ridiculous for me to talk about forgiving him as it would be for me to "forgive" a tile which falls on my head in a gale.
Topic: Christianity
Source: None
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
Topic: Evil
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
Topic: Impatience
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In those whom I like, I can find no common denominator; in those whom I love I can: they all make me laugh. -W. H. Auden.
Topic: Love
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Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh. Mother Teresa -W. H. Auden.
Topic: Love
Source: None
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He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
Topic: Love lost
Source: None
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
Topic: Names
Source: None
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
Topic: Paradise
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
Topic: Patience
Source: None
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All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
Topic: Sin
Source: None
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It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.
Topic: Talent
Source: None
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