Background Image

...

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

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Almost All Of Our

W. H. Auden

...

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.

Views: 6120

Topic

More From W. H. Auden

Art Is Born Of Humiliation.

Our Sufferings And Weaknesses, In So Far As They Are Personal, Are Of No Literary Interest Whatsoever. They Are Only Interesting In So Far As We Can See Them As Typical Of The Human Condition.

I Don't Get Acting Jobs Because Of My Looks.

Human Language Is Mythological And Metaphorical By Nature.

A Man Is A Form Of Life That Dreams In Order To Act And Acts In Order To Dream.

Nobody Knows What The Cause Is, Though Some Pretend They Do; It Like Some Hidden Assassin Waiting To Strike At You. Childless Women Get It, And Men When They Retire; It As If There Had To Be Some Outlet For Their Foiled Creative Fire.

Let Us Honor If We Can The Vertical Man, Though We Value None But The Horizontal One

The Commonest Ivory Tower Is That Of The Average Man, The State Of Passivity Towards Experience.

Every American Poet Feels That The Whole Responsibility For Contemporary Poetry Has Fallen Upon His Shoulders, That He Is A Literary Aristocracy Of One.

No Hero Is Mortal Till He Dies.

We Honor Founders Of These Starving Cities, Whose Honor Is The Image Of Our Sorrow.

Drama Is Based On The Mistake.

In Order That People May Be Happy In Their Work, These Three Things Are Needed: They Must Be Fit For It: They Must Not Do Too Much Of It: And They Must Have A Sense Of Success In It - Not A Doubtful Sense, Such As Needs Some Testimony Of Others For Its Confirmation, But A Sure Sense, Or Rather Knowledge, That So Much Work Has Been Done Well, And Fruitfully Done, Whatever The World May Say Or Think About It.

Encased In Talent Like A Uniform, The Rank Of Every Poet Is Well Known; They Can Amaze Us Like A Thunderstorm, Or Die So Young, Or Live For Years Alone.

Learn From Your Dreams What You Lack.

We All Have These Places Where Shy Humiliations Gambol On Sunny Afternoons.

Sunny Afternoon

The Friends Who Met Here And Embraced Are Gone, Each To His Own Mistake.

Health Is The State About Which Medicine Has Nothing To Say.

Shall Memory Restore The Steps And The Shore, The Face And The Meeting Place.

We Are All Here On Earth To Help Others.

Routine, In An Intelligent Man, Is A Sign Of Ambition.

Poetry Might Be Defined As The Clear Expression Of Mixed Feelings.

To Pray Is To Pay Attention To Something Or Someone Other Than Oneself.

Slavery Is So Intolerable A Condition That The Slave Can Hardly Escape Deluding Himself Into Thinking That He Is Choosing To Obey His Master's Commands When, In Fact, He Is Obliged To. Most Slaves Of Habit Suffer From This Delusion And So Do Some Writers, Enslaved By An All Too Personal Style.

Every Autobiography Is Concerned With Two Characters, A Don Quixote, The Ego, And A Sancho Panza, The Self.

There Is No Love; There Are Only The Various Envies, All Of Them Sad.

A Professor Is Someone Who Talks In Someone Else's Sleep.

One Of The Most Horrible, Yet Most Important, Discoveries Of Our Age Has Been That, If You Really Wish To Destroy A Person And Turn Him Into An Automaton, The Surest Method Is Not Physical Torture, In The Strict Sense, But Simply To Keep Him Awake, I.e., In An Existential Relation To Life Without Intermission.

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.

'healing,' Papa Would Tell Me, 'is Not A Science, But The Intuitive Art Of Wooing Nature.'

Most People Enjoy The Sight Of Their Own Handwriting As They Enjoy The Smell Of Their Own Farts.

As Biological Organisms Made Of Matter, We Are Subject To The Laws Of Physics And Biology: As Conscious Persons Who Create Our Own History We Are Free To Decide What That History Shall Be. Without Science, We Should Have No Notion Of Equality; Without Art, No Notion Of Liberty.

You Need Not See What Someone Is Doing To Know If It Is His Vocation, You Have Only To Watch His Eyes: A Cook Mixing A Sauce, A Surgeon Making A Primary Incision, A Clerk Completing A Bill Of Lading Wear The Same Rapt Expression, Forgetting Themselves In A Function. How Beautiful It Is, That Eye-on-the-obje Ct Look.

God Is Love, We Are Taught As Children To Believe. But When We First Begin To Get Some Inkling Of How He Loves Us, We Are Repelled; It Seems So Cold, Indeed, Not Love At All As We Understand The Word.

Time Will Say Nothing But I Told You So, Time Only Knows The Price We Have To Pay; If I Could Tell You I Would Let You Know.

O Let Not Time Deceive You, You Cannot Conquer Time.

If The Most Significant Characteristic Of Man Is The Complex Of Biological Needs He Shares With All Members Of His Species, Then The Best Lives For The Writer To Observe Are Those In Which The Role Of Natural Necessity Is Clearest, Namely, The Lives Of The Very Poor.

Dance, Dance, Dance Till You Drop.

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 Forever: I Was Wrong.

The Actors Today Really Need The Whip Hand. They're So Lazy. They Haven't Got The Sense Of Pride In Their Profession That The Less Socially Elevated Musical Comedy And Music Hall People Or Acrobats Have. The Theater Has Never Been Any Good Since The Actors Became Gentlemen.

Earth, Receive An Honored Guest; William Yeats Is Laid To Rest. Let The Irish Vessel Lie Emptied Of Its Poetry.

Far From His Illness The Wolves Ran On Through The Evergreen Forests, The Peasant River Was Untempted By The Fashionable Quays; By Mourning Tongues The Death Of The Poet Was Kept From His Poems.

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.

Music Is The Best Means We Have Of Digesting Time.

It Is Nonsense To Speak Of 'higher' And 'lower' Pleasures. To A Hungry Man It Is, Rightly, More Important That He Eat Than That He Philosophize.

The Closest Modern Equivalent To The Homeric Hero Is The Ace Fighter Pilot.

It's A Pity I Am So Impatient And Careless, As Any Ordinary Person Could Learn All The Techniques Of Photography In A Week. It Is The Democratic Art, I.e. Technical Skill Is Practically Eliminated - The More Foolproof Cameras Become With Focusing And Exposure Gadgets The Better - And Artistic Quality Depends Only On Choice Of Subject.

Men Will Pay Large Sums To Whores For Telling Them They Are Not Bores.

Thank God For Books As An Alternative To Conversation.

What Is A Professor Of Poetry? How Can Poetry Be Professed?

There's Only One Good Test Of Pornography. Get Twelve Normal Men To Read The Book, And Then Ask Them, ''did You Get An Erection?'' If The Answer Is ''yes'' From A Majority Of The Twelve, Then The Book Is Pornographic.

Behind You Swiftly The Figure Comes Softly, The Spot On Your Skin Is A Shocking Disease.

As A Rule, It Was The Pleasure-haters Who Became Unjust.

No Being Can Make Another One Happy.

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.

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 Concerned With Things, Not Persons, And Are Therefore Speechless. When I Find Myself In The Company Of Scientists, I Feel Like A Shabby Curate Who Has Strayed By Mistake Into A Drawing Room Full Of Dukes.

Oh, How I Wish That Orwell Were Still Alive, So That I Could Read His Comments On Contemporary Events!

Swans In The Winter Air A White Perfection Have

The Desires Of The Heart Are As Crooked As Corkscrews Not To Be Born Is The Best For Man The Second Best Is A Formal Order The Dance's Pattern, Dance While You Can. Dance, Dance, For The Figure Is Easy The Tune Is Catching And Will Not Stop Dance Till The Stars Come Down From The Rafters Dance, Dance, Dance Till You Drop.

If It Really Was Queen Elizabeth Who Demanded To See Falstaff In A Comedy, Then She Showed Herself A Very Perceptive Critic. But Even In The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Falstaff Has Not And Could Not Have Found His True Home Because Shakespeare Was Only A Poet. For That He Was To Wait Nearly Two Hundred Years Till Verdi Wrote His Last Opera. Falstaff Is Not The Only Case Of A Character Whose True Home Is The World Of Music; Others Are Tristan, Isolde And Don Giovanni.

Water Is The Soul Of The Earth.

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.

Warm Are The Still And Lucky Miles, White Shores Of Longing Stretch Away, A Light Of Recognition Fills The Whole Great Day, And Bright The Tiny World Of Lovers' Arms. Silence Invades The Breathing Wood Where Drowsy Limbs A Treasure Keep, Now Greenly Falls The Learned Shade Across The Sleeping Brows And Stirs Their Secret To A Smile. Restored! Returned! The Lost Are Borne On Seas Of Shipwreck Home At Last: See! In A Fire Of Praising Burns The Dry Dumb Past, And We Our Life-day Long Shall Part No More.

Stop All The Clocks, Cut Off The Telephone, Prevent The Dog From Barking With A Juicy Bone. Silence The Pianos And With Muffled Drum Bring Out The Coffin, Let The Mourners Come.

The Truly Tragic Kind Of Suffering Is The Kind Produced And Defiantly Insisted Upon By The Hero Himself So That, Instead Of Making Him Better, It Makes Him Worse And When He Dies He Is Not Reconciled To The Law But Defiant, That Is, Damned. Lear Is Not A Tragic Hero, Othello Is.

A Poet's Hope: To Be, Like Some Valley Cheese, Local, But Prized Elsewhere.

Money Is The Necessity That Frees Us From Necessity. Of All Novelists In Any Country, Trollope Best Understands The Role Of Money. Compared With Him Even Balzac Is A Romantic.

I Smell Blood And An Era Of Prominent Madmen.

See Without Looking, Hear Without Listening, Breathe Without Asking.

The Ogre Does What Ogres Can, Deeds Quite Impossible For Man, But One Prize Is Beyond His Reach, The Ogre Cannot Master Speech: About A Subjugated Plain, Among Its Desperate And Slain, The Ogre Stalks With Hands On Hips, While Drivel Gushes From His Lips.

I Just Try To Put The Thing Out And Hope Somebody Will Read It. Someone Says: 'whom Do You Write For?' I Reply: 'do You Read Me?' If They Say 'yes,' I Say, 'do You Like It?' If They Say 'no,' Then I Say, 'i Don't Write For You.'

A Poet Is A Professional Maker Of Verbal Objects.

A Poet Can Write About A Man Slaying A Dragon, But Not About A Man Pushing A Button That Releases A Bomb.

The Older Lives Like Not To Be Stood In Rows Or At Right Angles.

A Poor American Feels Guilty At Being Poor, But Less Guilty Than An American Rentier Who Has Inherited Wealth But Is Doing Nothingto Increase It; What Can The Latter Do But Take To Drink And Psychoanalysis?

Cathedrals, Luxury Liners Laden With Souls, Holding To The East Their Hulls Of Stone.

The Americans Are Violently Oral. That's Why In America The Mother Is All-important And The Father Has No Position At All -- Isn't Respected In The Least. Even The American Passion For Laxatives Can Be Explained As An Oral Manifestation. They Want To Get Rid Of Any Unpleasantness Taken In Through The Mouth.

Accurate Scholarship Can Unearth The Whole Offence From Luther Untill Noe That Has Driven A Culture Mad. From What Occured At Linz What Huge Imago Made A Psychopathic God. I And The Public Know What All Schoolchildren Learn Those To Whom Evil Is Done Do Evil In Return.

To Be Free Is Often To Be Lonely.

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.

One Rational Voice Is Dumb: Over A Grave The Household Of Impulse Mourns One Dearly Loved. Sad Is Eros, Builder Of Cities, And Weeping Anarchic Aphrodite.

The Habit-forming Pain, Mismanagement And Grief: We Must Suffer Them All Again.

The Most Important Truths Are Likely To Be Those Which Society At That Time Least Wants To Hear.

Into This Neutral Air Where Blind Skyscrapers Use Their Full Height To Proclaim The Strength Of Collective Man, Each Language Pours Its Vain Competitive Excuse.

Civilizations Should Be Measured By The Degree Of Diversity Attained And The Degree Of Unity Retained.

Evil Is Unspectacular And Always Human, And Shares Our Bed And Eats At Our Own Table.

I And The Public Know What All Schoolchildren Learn, Those To Whom Evil Is Done Do Evil In Return.

One Of The Troubles Of Our Times Is That We Are All, I Think, Precocious As Personalities And Backward As Characters.

Why Doesn't The United States Take Over The Monarchy And Unite With England? England Does Have Important Assets. Naturally The Longer You Wait, The More They Will Dwindle. At Least You Could Use It For A Summer Resort Instead Of Maine.

We Would Rather Be Ruined Than Changed. We Would Rather Die In Our Dread Than Climb The Cross Of The Moment And Let Our Illusions Die.

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?

Sexual Fidelity Is More Important In A Homosexual Relationship Than In Any Other. In Other Relationships There Are A Variety Of Ties. But Here, Fidelity Is The Only Bond.

A Real Book Is Not One That We Read, But One That Reads Us.

We Were Put On This Earth To Help Others. Why Others Were Put Here Is Beyond Me.

One Cannot Walk Through An Assembly Factory And Not Feel That One Is In Hell.

To Save Your World You Asked This Man To Die; Would This Man, Could He See You Now, Ask Why?

And None Will Hear The Postman’s Knock Without A Quickening Of The Heart. For Who Can Bear To Feel Himself Forgotten?

All Wishes, Whatever Their Apparent Content, Have The Same And Unvarying Meaning: "i Refuse To Be What I Am."

Lost In A Haunted Wood, Children Afraid Of The Night Who Have Never Been Happy Or Good.

Some Books Are Undeservedly Forgotten; None Are Undeservedly Remembered.

Proper Names Are Poetry In The Raw. Like All Poetry They Are Untranslatable.

Acts Of Injustice Done Between The Setting And The Rising Sun In History Lie Like Bones, Each One.

A Doctor, Like Anyone Else Who Has To Deal With Human Beings, Each Of Them Unique, Cannot Be A Scientist; He Is Either, Like The Surgeon, A Craftsman, Or, Like The Physician And The Psychologist, An Artist. This Means That In Order To Be A Good Doctor A Man Must Also Have A Good Character, That Is To Say, Whatever Weaknesses And Foibles He May Have, He Must Love His Fellow Human Beings In The Concrete And Desire Their Good Before His Own.

Christmas And Easter Can Be Subjects For Poetry, But Good Friday, Like Auschwitz, Cannot. The Reality Is So Horrible It Is Not Surprising That People Should Have Found It A Stumbling Block To Faith.

Machines Have No Political Opinions, But They Have Profound Political Effects. They Demand A Strict Regimentation Of Time, And, By Abolishing The Need For Manual Skill, Have Transformed The Majority Of The Population From Workers Into Laborers. There Are, That Is To Say, Fewer And Fewer Jobs Which A Man Can Find A Pride And Satisfaction In Doing Well, More And More Which Have No Interest In Themselves And Can Be Valued Only For The Money They Provide.

The Only Reason The Protestants And Catholics Have Given Up The Idea Of Universal Domination Is Because They've Realised They Can't Get Away With It.

To Choose What Is Difficult All One's Days, As If It Were Easy, That Is Faith

Anyone Who Has A Child Today Should Train Him To Be Either A Physicist Or A Ballet Dancer. Then He'll Escape.

A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods

A Verbal Art Like Poetry Is Reflective; It Stops To Think. Music Is Immediate, It Goes On To Become.

Words Have No Word For Words That Are Not True.

There Are Three Cardinal Rules - Don't Take Somebody Else's Boyfriend Unless You've Been Specifically Invited To Do So, Don't Take A Drink Without Being Asked, And Keep A Scrupulous Accounting In Financial Matters.

No Human Being Is Innocent, But There Is A Class Of Innocent Human Actions Called Games.

Mad Ireland Hurt You Into Poetry.

Few Can Remember Clearly When Innocence Came To A Sudden End, The Moment At Which We Ask For The First Time: Am I Loved?

There Are Good Books Which Are Only For Adults. There Are No Good Books Which Are Only For Children.

O Plunge Your Hands In Water, Plunge Them In Up To The Wrist; Stare, Stare In The Basin And Wonder What You've Missed.

Pleasure Is By No Means An Infallible Critical Guide, But It Is The Least Fallible.

There Was Still Gold And Silver In The Mountains, And Hunger Was A More Immediate Sorrow

Look If You Like, But You Will Have To Leap.

In The Deserts Of The Heart Let The Healing Fountain Start.

Hunger Allows No Choice.

The Condition Of Mankind Is, And Always Has Been, So Miserable And Depraved That, If Anyone Were To Say To The Poet: "for God's Sake Stop Singing And Do Something Useful Like Putting On The Kettle Or Fetching Bandages," What Just Reason Could He Give For Refusing?

To The Man-in-the-street, Who, I'm Sorry To Say, Is A Keen Observer Of Life. The Word Intellectual Suggests Straight Away. A Man Who's Untrue To His Wife.

To Make One, There Must Be Two.

Beauty, Midnight, Vision Dies: Let The Winds Of Dawn That Blow Softly Round Your Dreaming Head Such A Day Of Welcome Show Eye And Knocking Heart May Bless, Find Our Mortal World Enough; Noons Of Dryness Find You Fed By The Involuntary Powers, Nights Of Insult Let You Pass Watched By Every Human Love.

We Who Must Die Demand A Miracle. How Could The Eternal Do A Temporal Act, The Infinite Become A Finite Fact? Nothing Can Save Us That Is Possible: We Who Must Die Demand A Miracle.

Herds Of Reindeer Move Across Miles And Miles Of Golden Moss

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.

There Has Been A Vast Output Of Critical Studies In Contemporary Poetry, Some Of Them First Rate, But I Do Not Think That , As A Rule, A Poet Should Read Them.

A Writer, Or At Least A Poet, Is Always Being Asked By People Who Should Know Better: “whom Do You Write For?” The Question Is, Of Course, A Silly One, But I Can Give It A Silly Answer. Occasionally I Come Across A Book Which I Feel Has Been Written Especially For Me And For Me Only. Like A Jealous Lover I Don’t Want Anybody Else To Hear Of It. To Have A Million Such Readers, Unaware Of Each Other’s Existence, To Be Read With Passion And Never Talked About, Is The Daydream, Surely, Of Every Author.

A Small Grove Massacred To The Last Ash, An Oak With Heart-rot, Give Away The Show: This Great Society Is Going To Smash; They Cannot Fool Us With How Fast They Go, How Much They Cost Each Other And The Gods. A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods.

Machines Are Beneficial To The Degree That They Eliminate The Need For Labor, Harmful To The Degree That They Eliminate The Need For Skill.

The Lights Must Never Go Out, The Music Must Always Play

Political History Is Far Too Criminal To Be A Fit Subject Of Study For The Young. Children Should Acquire Their Heroes And Villians From Fiction.

About Suffering They Were Never Wrong, The Old Masters.

In A Land Which Is Fully Settled, Most Men Must Accept Their Local Environment Or Try To Change It By Political Means; Only The Exceptionally Gifted Or Adventurous Can Leave To Seek His Fortune Elsewhere. In America, On The Other Hand, To Move On And Make A Fresh Start Somewhere Else Is Still The Normal Reaction To Dissatisfaction And Failure.

Choice Of Attention - To Pay Attention To This And Ignore That - Is To The Inner Life What Choice Of Action Is To The Outer. In Both Cases, A Man Is Responsible For His Choice And Must Accept The Consequences, Whatever They May Be.

Time And Fevers Burn Away Individual Beauty From Thoughtful Children, And The Grave Proves The Child Ephemeral

Every Man Carries With Him Through Life A Mirror, As Unique And Impossible To Get Rid Of As His Shadow.

Aside From Purely Technical Analysis, Nothing Can Be Said About Music, Except When It Is Bad; When It Is Good, One Can Only Listen And Be Grateful.

Yet No One Hears His Own Remarks As Prose.

Every High C Accurately Struck Demolishes The Theory That We Are The Irresponsible Puppets Of Fate Or Chance.

Our Claim To Our Own Bodies And Our World Is Our Catastrophe.

My Face Looks Like A Wedding-cake Left Out In The Rain.

The Only Way To Spend New Year's Eve Is Either Quietly With Friends Or In A Brothel. Otherwise When The Evening Ends And People Pair Off, Someone Is Bound To Be Left In Tears.

Genealogies Are Admirable Things, Provided They Do Not Encourage The Curious Delusion That Some Families Are Older Than Others.

We Are Not Commanded (or Forbidden) To Love Our Mates, Our Children, Our Friends, Our Country Because Such Affections Come Naturally To Us And Are Good In Themselves, Although We May Corrupt Them. We Are Commanded To Love Our Neighbor Because Our Natural Attitude Toward The Other Is One Of Either Indifference Or Hostility.

The Stars Are Dead. The Animals Will Not Look: We Are Left Alone With Our Day, And The Time Is Short, And History To The Defeated May Say Alas But Cannot Help Nor Pardon.

I Know Nothing, Except What Everyone Knows - If There When Grace Dances, I Should Dance.

The Relation Of Faith Between Subject And Object Is Unique In Every Case. Hundreds May Believe, But Each Has To Believe By Himself.

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.

To Ask The Hard Question Is Simple.

It Is Already Possible To Imagine A Society In Which The Majority Of The Population, That Is To Say, Its Laborers, Will Have Almost As Much Leisure As In Earlier Times Was Enjoyed By The Aristocracy. When One Recalls How Aristocracies In The Past Actually Behaved, The Prospect Is Not Cheerful.

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.

But If A Stranger In The Train Asks Me My Occupation, I Never Answer "writer" For Fear That He May Go On To Ask Me What I Write, And To Answer "poetry" Would Embarrass Us Both, For We Both Know That Nobody Can Earn A Living Simply By Writing Poetry.

We Are Lived By Powers We Pretend To Understand.

It Has Been Said That A Poem Should Not Mean But Be. This Is Not Quite Accurate. In A Poem, As Distinct From Many Other Kinds Of Verbal Societies, Meaning And Being Are Identical. A Poem Might Be Called A Pseudo-person. Like A Person, It Is Unique And Addresses The Reader Personally. On The Other Hand, Like A Natural Being And Unlike A Historical Person, It Cannot Lie.

To Me Art's Subject Is The Human Clay, / And Landscape But A Background To A Torso; / All Cezanne's Apples I Would Give Away / For One Small Goya Or A Daumier.

The Most Exciting Rhythms Seem Unexpected And Complex, The Most Beautiful Melodies Simple And Inevitable.

No Poet Or Novelist Wishes He Were The Only One Who Ever Lived, But Most Of Them Wish They Were The Only One Alive, And Quite A Number Fondly Believe Their Wish Has Been Granted.

Does God Judge Us By Appearances? I Suspect That He Does.

The Slogan Of Hell: Eat Or Be Eaten. The Slogan Of Heaven: Eat And Be Eaten.

The Element Of Craftsmanship In Poetry Is Obscured By The Fact That All Men Are Taught To Speak And Most To Read And Write, While Very Few Men Are Taught To Draw Or Paint Or Write Music.

Now Is The Age Of Anxiety.

God Bless The Usa, So Large, So Friendly, And So Rich.

If Time Were The Wicked Sheriff In A Horse Opera, I'd Pay For Riding Lessons And Take His Gun Away.

The Stars Are Not Wanted Now, Put Out Every One Pack Up The Moon & Dismantle The Sun.

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.

Had Greek Civilization Never Existed ... We Would Never Have Become Fully Conscious.

All Pity Is Self-pity.

All The Rest Is Silence On The Other Side Of The Wall, And The Silence Ripeness, And The Ripeness All.

If We Apply The Term Revolution To What Happened In North America Between 1776 And 1829, It Has A Special Meaning. Normally, The Word Describes The Process By Which Man Transforms Himself From One Kind Of Man, Living In One Kind Of Society, With One Way Of Looking At The World, Into Another Kind Of Man, Another Society, Another Conception Of Life.... The American Case Is Different: It Is Not A Question Of The Old Man Transforming Himself Into The New, But Of The New Man Becoming Alive To The Fact That He Is New, That He Has Been Transformed Already Without His Having Realized It.

Even The Dreadful Martyrdom Must Run Its Course Anyhow In A Corner, Some Untidy Spot Where The Dogs Go On With Their Doggy Life

Words Are For Those With Promises To Keep.

An Unmanly Sort Of Man Whose Love Life Seems To Have Been Largely Confined To Crying In Laps And Playing Mouse.

There's Always Another Story. There's More Than Meets The Eye.

More Than Meets The Eye

If Age, Which Is Certainly Just As Wicked As Youth, Look Any Wiser, It Is Only That Youth Is Still Able To Believe It Will Get Away With Anything, While Age Knows Only Too Well That It Has Got Away With Nothing.

For Time Is Inches And The Heart's Changes, Where Ghost Has Haunted Lost And Wanted.

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.

Be Subtle, Various, Ornamental, Clever, And Do Not Listen To Those Critics Ever Whose Crude Provincial Gullets Crave In Books Plain Cooking Made Still Plainer By Plain Cooks.

Drama Began As The Act Of A Whole Community. Ideally, There Would Be No Speculators. In Practice, Every Member Of The Audience Should Feel Like An Understudy.

You Will Be A Poet Because You Will Always Be Humiliated.

Adjectives Are The Potbelly Of Poetry.

Between The Ages Of Twenty And Forty We Are Engaged In The Process Of Discovering Who We Are, Which Involves Learning The Differences Between Accidental Limitations Which It Is Our Duty To Outgrow And The Necessary Limitations Of Our Nature Beyond Which We Cannot Trespass With Impunity.

August For The People And Their Favourite Islands. Daily The Steamers Sidle Up To Meet The Effusive Welcome Of The Pier.

The Countenances Of Children, Like Those Of Animals, Are Masks, Not Faces, For They Have Not Yet Developed A Significant Profile Of Their Own.

Whatever You Do, Good Or Bad, People Will Always Have Something Negative To Say

The True Men Of Action In Our Time, Those Who Transform The World, Are Not The Politicians And Statesmen, But The Scientists

Some Writers Confuse Authenticity, Which They Ought Always To Aim At, With Originality, Which They Should Never Bother About.

Funny Basketball

How Should We Like It Were Stars To Burn With A Passion For Us We Could Not Return? If Equal Affection Cannot Be, Let The More Loving One Be Me.

America Has Always Been A Country Of Amateurs Where The Professional, That Is To Say, The Man Who Claims Authority As A Member Of An élite Which Knows The Law In Some Field Or Other, Is An Object Of Distrust And Resentment.

I Am Sure It Is Everyone’s Experience, As It Has Been Mine, That Any Discovery We Make About Ourselves Or The Meaning Of Life Is Never, Like A Scientific Discovery, A Coming Upon Something Entirely New And Unsuspected; It Is Rather, The Coming To Conscious Recognition Of Something, Which We Really Knew All The Time But, Because We Were Unwilling To Formulate It Correctly, We Did Not Hitherto Know We Knew.

Meaning Of Life

But He Would Have Us Most Of All Remember To Be Enthusiastic Over The Night. Not Only For The Sense Of Wonder It Alone Has To Offer But Also Because It Needs Our Love. For With Sad Eyes Its Delectable Creatures Look Up And Beg Us Dumbly To Ask Them To Follow. They Are Exiles Who Long For A Future That Lies In Our Power.

Without Communication With The Dead, A Fully Human Life Is Not Possible.

A Poem Is A Verbal Artifact Which Must Be As Skillfully And Solidly Constructed As A Table Or A Motorcycle.

Geniuses Are The Luckiest Of Mortals Because What They Must Do Is The Same As What They Most Want To Do.

All I Have Is A Voice.

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 Subjectively, We Feel Responsible For Our Time, And The Notion Of Punctuality Arises.

Goodness Is Easier To Recognize Than To Define.

Trending Author

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Sergio Aragones

Michael Schenker

Category