W. H. Auden Quotes

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

I'm not as hopeful as I was when I was young.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

Youth is wasted on the young.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.

As we get older - perhaps I'm just speaking for myself - we can get too cynical.

I feel old and vulnerable. I now realise that I knew nothing and know nothing, but back when my career was beginning, I thought I was a man when, in fact, I was a dewy-eyed boy who'd not seen an avocado or eaten a tomato.

People often yearn back to more innocent times, but more and more, as I get older, I find myself hankering after more jaded days.

I wouldn't go back and be 25 again for all the tea in China.

At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can't.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

A lot of 18-year-olds are like old men. They think they've seen everything.

I don't want to be 25 again.

I wouldn't be young again even if it were possible, but I am not going to pretend that growing old is all sweetness and light.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

People say you become more cynical as you get older. That hasn't been my experience.

I used to love getting older.

I've been around a long time. I've seen it all before.

In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose.

The older you get, the better you realize you were.

About the time we get old enough to be as wicked as we want to be, we don't want to be so very wicked after all.

Old age hath stronger sense of right than youth.

When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much.