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Librettist Inspirational Quotes (7320)

Page 20 of 305
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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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Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred without Science, we should always worship false gods.
W. H. Auden
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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
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Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.
W. H. Auden
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The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake.
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
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Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last Nurses to their graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.
W. H. Auden
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The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
W. H. Auden
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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. Auden
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One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
W. H. Auden
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O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.
W. H. Auden
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The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
W. H. Auden
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Love each other or perish.
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
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The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have Not universal love But to be loved alone.
W. H. Auden
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The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
W. H. Auden
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Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
W. H. Auden
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Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
W. H. Auden
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Water is the soul of the Earth.
W. H. Auden
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It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
W. H. Auden
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Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. Auden
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It is, for example, 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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As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
W. H. Auden
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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
W. H. Auden
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