W. H. Auden Quotes

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

It's all real and it's all illusory: that's Awareness!

Nothing is more abstract than reality.

Those who know it do not speak about it. Those who speak about it do not know it.

To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.

Superficial people find the extraordinary fascinating, and profound people find the ordinary riveting.

I, who have never heard a sound, tell you there is no silence, and I, who have never seen a ray of light, tell you there is no darkness.

A paradox is only a truth standing on its head to attract attention.

Let the ugly light of the world in, we are no longer blind.

Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them,you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?

People who know the truth have no business to allow the powers of darkness to silence them on any point that matters.

Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not.

The part of my brain that was responsible for creating the world I lived and moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down, and out. And yet despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and reality. There was, for me, simply no arguing this fact. I knew it so completely that I ached.

Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.

The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.

Art like life is an open secret.

People believe I am what they see Me as, rather than what they do not see. But I am the Great Unseen, not what I cause Myself to be in any particular moment. In a sense, I am what I am not. It is from the Am-notness that I come, and to it I always return.

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.

Those things that are in the light we behold from darkness.

Truth strikes us from behind and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.

The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.

People think that they see, but they don't.

Everything is illusion. Even that last sentence.

The truth is always an abyss.