W.H. Auden

“When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton”

“Some thirty inches from my nose The frontier of my Person goes, And all the untilled air between Is private pagus or demesne. Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes I beckon you to fraternize, B...”

“Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts.”

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”

“I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.”

“Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when...”

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

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was...”

“So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it s...”

“In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day.”

“Let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.”

“The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are...”

“Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.”