W. H. Auden quotes
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“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
-- W. H. AudenSource : W. H. Auden, Katherine Bucknell (2003). “Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928”, p.105, Princeton University Press
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“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”
-- W. H. AudenSource : Wystan Hugh Auden (2011). “The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue”, p.105, Princeton University Press
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“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.”
-- W. H. AudenSource : W.H. Auden (2016). “Canción de cuna y otros poemas”, p.86, DEBOLS!LLO
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“We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.”
-- W. H. AudenSource : W H Auden (1981). “Antæus”, Ecco Press
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“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”
-- W. H. AudenSource : Dyer's Hand (1963) "Notes on the Comic"
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“The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.”
-- W. H. AudenSource : W. H. Auden, Katherine Bucknell (2003). “Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928”, p.41, Princeton University Press
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“No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.”
-- W. H. AudenSource : W H Auden (1981). “Antæus”, Ecco Press
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“A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.”
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“The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?”
-- W. H. Auden -
“It is axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time; conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?”
-- W. H. Auden -
“If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them -- the one, in fact, which is not a mask.”
-- W. H. AudenSource : "Forewords and Afterwords" by W. H. Auden, ("One of the Family"), (p. 369), 1973.
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“In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.”
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“Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, Dance, Dance 'till you drop.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith”
-- W. H. Auden -
“He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State and no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“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.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?”
-- W. H. Auden -
“The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.”
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“Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.”
-- W. H. Auden#Discovery Quotes #Meaning Of Life Quotes #Recognition Quotes
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“One cannot review a bad book without showing off.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”
-- W. H. Auden#Confusion Quotes #Confusing Quotes #Funny Basketball Quotes
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“The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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“See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.”
-- W. H. AudenSource : W. H. Auden (2013). “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”, p.23, Princeton University Press
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“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.”
-- W. H. Auden -
“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
-- W. H. Auden -
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