In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise

— W.H. Auden

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

— W.H. Auden

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

— W.H. Auden

I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?

— W.H. Auden

I write because I love to play with language.

— W.H. Auden

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you think you never thought or felt before.

— W.H. Auden

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbor completely.

— W.H. Auden

Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality. . . And by the sharpness of their insights. . . . But with successive readings one’s doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one’s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn to an equally exaggerated aversion. Of all such writers, one might say that one cannot imagine them as children. The more we read them, the more we become aware that something has gone badly wrong with their affective life;. . . It is not only impossible to imagine one of them as a happy husband or wife, it is impossible to imagine their having a single intimate friend to whom they could open their hearts.

— W.H. Auden

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

— W.H. Auden

Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.

— W.H. Auden