W. H. Auden Quotes

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

When you're out of office, you can be a statesman.

A politician is a man who understands government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for 15 years.

You don’t become a statesman unless you are first a good politician.

Eloquence and wisdom are by no means the same thing. They are sometimes united, but not necessarily ; perhaps never when eloquence is the mere gift of nature rather than the slow result of nature and art conjoined. A ready supply of glittering language and an ardent conception, i. e. a fertile imagination, and quick feelings, united to a retentive memory—these are together quite sufficient to make an orator, but by no means to make a wise man; to make a speaker or even a leader in a popular assembly, but not necessarily a statesman.

Of all our public men of today he stands first in my reverence & admiration, & the next one stands two-hundred-&-twenty-fifth. He is the only statesman we have now. ... Cleveland drunk is a more valuable asset to this country than the whole batch of the rest of our public men sober. He is high-minded; all his impulses are great & pure & fine. I wish we had another of this sort.

This country deserves a statesman who can represent the people with proper decorum, respect, and knowledge of what's happening in the world, and I don't believe that Donald Trump represents any of that.

A politician before he can become a statesman has to remain in office long enough.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

Tim Bee has demonstrated his toughness and his compassion, his ability to lead while at the same time listening to others. These are skills few people in public life have. We need Tim Bee working for us in Congress.

Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time... Creative individuals have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

Nature abhors a vacuum, even in the heads of statesmen.

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.

Creating things I think, especially as an actor - wanting to bring to the table things that have never been done before, but also making sure they're of high quality and not having a fear.

Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.

In Washington, when you’re a leader, you have to put aside partisan politics to do what’s right for the people.

I think I tend to destroy the better paintings, or those that have been better to a certain extent. I try and take them further, and they lose all their qualities, and they lose everything. I think I would say that I destroy all the better paintings.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too - but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them.

Th' embroid'ry of poetic dreams.

[Obama is ] creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom . . . [He is] the man for this time.

No man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman - the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man.

The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.