W. H. Auden Quotes

In his life, Charles Dickens was like the rest of us, but maybe more so: another poor and wonderful soul attempting to deal with his and the world's pain and confusion in the best way he knew how.

If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.

Although I think I'm relatively happy as a person, I think there's something unhappy at the root of all my writing. I'd say optimistic but unhappy. Nothing that's particularly original, other than that we're going to live and die, and terrible things happen.

A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.

To suffer and to endure is the lot of humanity.

We are all frail-embodied creatures, who at times suffer through injustice, abuse, illness, pain and misfortune.

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.

We are all sure of two things, at least; we shall suffer and we shall all die.

A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.

Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.

The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

The lot of man - to suffer and to die.

You go to movies to see people you love suffer - that's why you go to the movies. You don't go to see a movie about a guy who already knows he has a wonderful life.

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.

Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.