Bruce Hamill > Bruce's Quotes

“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.”
― W.H. Auden

“We must love one another or die”
― W.H. Auden

“You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.”
― Wystan Hugh Auden

“A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”
― W.H. Auden

“A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.”
― W.H. Auden

“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 fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.”
― W.H. Auden, Another Time

“The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep. ”
― W.H. Auden

“Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.”
― W. H. Auden

“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation. ”
― W. H. Auden

“As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like.
For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.”
― W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

“Beloved, we are always in the wrong,
Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long,
Too careful even in our selfish loves:
The decorative manias we obey
Die in grimaces round us every day,
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command - Rejoice. ”
― W.H. Auden, The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden.

“We are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know.”
― W.H. Auden

“Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.”
― W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955

“Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.”
― W.H. Auden

“And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”
― W.H. Auden

“The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Essays

“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
― W.H. Auden

“The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.”
― W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.”
― W.H. Auden

“A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.”
― W.H. Auden

“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,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.”
― W.H. Auden

“Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.”
― W.H. Auden

“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”
― W.H. Auden

“And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went”
― W.H. Auden

“He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.”
― W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio

“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”
― W. H. Auden, Collected Poems

“Richard Hays has offered the following important comment on 2 Cor 5:21: Notice carefully what Paul actually says here: Not “so that we might know about the righteousness of God.” Not “so that we might believe in the righteousness of God.” Not “so that we might proclaim the righteousness of God.” Not even “so that we might be justified by the righteousness of God.” Rather, he says, “so that we might become the righteousness of God.” Our commission from God is that we as a community are called to embody the righteousness of God in the world—to incarnate it, if you will—in such a way that the message of reconciliation is made visible in our midst. And of course reconciliation made visible is something that can appear only in practices that show unity, love, mercy, forgiveness and a self-giving grace that the world could not even dream of apart from Christ.158”
― Michael J. Gorman, The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant: A (Not So) New Model of the Atonement