Zitat des Tages von W. H. Auden:
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
No hero is mortal till he dies.
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
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.
It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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.
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
Art is born of humiliation.
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
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.
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
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?
