Wystan Hugh Auden citáty

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„Vybrať si to, čo je ťažké, akoby to bolo ľahké, každý deň, to je viera.“

„Človek je dejinotvorné stvorenie, ktoré nemôže opakovať svoju minulosť, ani ju nechať za sebou.“

„Logika je umenie ísť plný dôvery nesprávnym smerom.“

„Malí tyrani ohrozovaní veľkými sú úprimne presvedčení, že milujú slobodu.“

„Medzi tými, ktorých mám rád alebo obdivujem nemôžem nájsť žiadneho spoločného menovateľa, ale môžem ho nájsť medzi tými, ktorých milujem: všetci ma rozosmejú.“

„To, čo ponúkajú hromadné oznamovacie prostriedky, nie je populárne umenie, ale zábava, ktorá je určená nato, aby bola skonzumovaná ako jedlo, zabudnutá a nahradená ďalším chodom.“

„Umenie je duchovný život umožnený vedou.“

“To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician, The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.”

“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.”

“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”

“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.”

“To ask the hard question is simple,
The simple act of the confused will.”

“Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.”

“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.”

“The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.”

“Every day America's destroyed and re-created,
America is what you do,
America is I and you,
America is what you choose to make it.”

“I am beginning to lose patience
With my personal relations.
They are not deep
And they are not cheap.”

“The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

“One can only blaspheme if one believes.”

“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”

“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,I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.”

“To some degree every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”

“Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.”

“In general, when reading a scholarly critic, one profits more from his quotations than from his comments.”

“I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.”

“I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.”

“In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.”

“Put the car away; when life fails
What's the good of going to Wales?
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?”

“A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.”

“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.”

“At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.”

“Let us then
Consider rather the incessant Now of
The traveler through time, his tired mind
Biased towards bigness since his body must
Exaggerate to exist, possessed by hope…”

“Now is the age of anxiety.”

“The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.”

“To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged.”

“Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.”