W. H. Auden Quotes (122 quotes, page 2)

A quotation from Igor Stravinsky, not Auden. Cited as Auden's through a misreading of a paragraph in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, by Robert Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 6. (The antecedent of "he" is unmistakably "Mr. S." in Craft's sentence: "He also makes a marvelous remark to the effect that 'Music is the best means we have of digesting time'"; and in the sentence that follows "he" is again Stravinsky, not Auden.)
Misattributed

Music , Time

“A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.”

W. H. Auden book The Shield of Achilles

The Shield of Achilles (1952)

Waiting

“Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.”

W. H. Auden

In Memory of Sigmund Freud (1939), lines 111–112

Sadness

“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 book The Dyer's Hand

"Hic et Ille", p. 105
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“When I consider others I can easily believe that their bodies express their personalities and that the two are inseparable. But it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Hic et Ille", p. 104
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Feeling , Nature , Housing , Personality

“All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: "I refuse to be what I am."”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Interlude: West's Disease", p. 241
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“I never write when I'm drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn't like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn't like slavish devotion — then she lies.”

W. H. Auden

Source: Paris Review interview (1972), p. 254

Girl

“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 78–88; for a 1955 anthology text the poet changed this line to "We must love one another and die" to avoid what he regarded as a falsehood in the original.

Love , Hunger , Lie

“Minus times minus equals plus,
The reason for this we need not discuss.”

W. H. Auden

As stated in "The Poet Himself" http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E6D81539F937A35753C1A967948260 by Paul Fussell, in The New York Times (4 October 1981), these lines were a "math mnemonic" which Auden "had to memorize as a child."
Misattributed

Time

“O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.”

W. H. Auden

As I Walked Out One Evening (1937)

Water , Tea , Dead

“Base words are uttered only by the base
And can for such at once be understood;
But noble platitudes — ah, there's a case
Where the most careful scrutiny is needed
To tell a voice that's genuinely good
From one that's base but merely has succeeded.”

W. H. Auden

Base words are uttered (1940), lines 1–5

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.”

W. H. Auden

Source: Funeral Blues (1936)

Love

“On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our feverAre precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruinAre projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.”

W. H. Auden book Spain

Source: Spain (1937), Lines 65–76

Friendship , People , Fear , Winter

“The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 56–58

Personality

“Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.”

W. H. Auden

Source: In Memory of W.B. Yeats (1939), Lines 66–77

Singing , Heart , Night

“The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.”

W. H. Auden book The Shield of Achilles

The Shield of Achilles (1952)

Men , World , Hope , Help

“A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Don Juan", p. 403
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Friendship

“By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs.
The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers. Now he is scattered over a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.”

W. H. Auden

Source: In Memory of W.B. Yeats (1939), Lines 10–23

Death , Feeling , Silence , Dead

“All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"The Poet & The City", p. 84
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Imagination

“Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.”

W. H. Auden

Look, Stranger, on This Island Now (1936), first published in book form in Look, Stranger! (1936; US title On this Island)

Light , Sea

“Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
In which a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.”

W. H. Auden

After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics (1961), lines 9–16

Love , Marriage , Lovers , Kiss

“It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"Markings", p. 438
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

People , Thinking , Time

“Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to their graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.”

W. H. Auden

Source: Autumn Song (1936), Lines 1–4

Flowers

“And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river." And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. Descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."”

W. H. Auden book Spain

Source: Spain (1937), Lines 33–44

Life , History , Loss , Time

“In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement, it was also easier to tell a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some music, a man has to wait for six months and then walk twenty miles, it is easy to tell whether the words, "I should like to hear some music," mean what they appear to mean, or merely, "At this moment I should like to forget myself." When all he has to do is press a switch, it is more difficult. He may easily come to believe that wishes can come true.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

Interlude: West's Disease", p. 245
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Music , Appearance , Waiting , Forgetting

“The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor — dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Writing", p. 22
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Cooking

“It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940."”

W. H. Auden

Source: Paris Review interview (1972), p. 250

Age

“All pity is self-pity.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Interlude: West's Disease", p. 243
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“A real book reads us.”

W. H. Auden

Reported by Lionel Trilling in "On the Modern Element in Modern Literature", Partisan Review, January-February 1961, p. 15 (reprinted in Trilling's Beyond Culture, 1965): Trilling wrote: "taking the cue of W. H. Auden's remark that a real book reads us, I have been read by Eliot's poems...".
More commonly reported as "a real book is not one that we read but one that reads us". This paraphrase of Trilling's reported quotation first appeared in a review by Robie Macauley of Trilling's Beyond Culture in the New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1965, p. 38: "I must borrow a phrase from Mr. Trilling (who borrows it from W. H. Auden): a real book is not one that we read but one that reads us." The same version, attributed to Auden, appears in Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips & Quotes (1968), p. 87 (with a comma after "we read"). There is no evidence that Auden ever wrote or said this version of the phrase.
Other variations (e.g. "not one that's read" for "not one that we read") seem to be misrecollections of Robie Macaulay's paraphrase.
Reported quotations

Books , Reading