W. H. Auden Quotes About Desire

Quotes about: Desire

• 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.

  W. H. Auden

  Love, Character, Mean

• Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.

  W. H. Auden

  Sensual, Wish, Desire

• To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God - that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.

  W. H. Auden

  God, Prayer, Children

• You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.

  W. H. Auden

  Relationship, Beauty, Differences

• 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.

  W. H. Auden

  Stars, Heart, Men

  Letter from Iceland (1937, by Auden and MacNeice) "Letter to William Coldstream, Esq."

• Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire; Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.

  W. H. Auden

  Running, Fire, Squares

• A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Creativity, Desire

• An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

  W. H. Auden

  Men, Self, Ego

• There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?

  W. H. Auden

  Art, Desire, Doe

• Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.

  W. H. Auden

  Men, Important, Desire

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