W. H. Auden

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?

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

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.

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.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

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.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

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.

Art is born of humiliation.