W. H. Auden Children Quotations

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.

God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.

the child unlucky in his little State, Some hearth where freedom is excluded, A hive whose honey is fear and worry, Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape

Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral

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.

Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.

There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation, And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had everything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.