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Literary Historian Inspirational Quotes (5894)

Page 8 of 246
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Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
W. H. Auden
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The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
W. H. Auden
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Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
W. H. Auden
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A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going to smash They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods. A culture is no better than its woods.
W. H. Auden
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You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
W. H. Auden
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No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
W. H. Auden
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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
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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
W. H. Auden
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Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.
W. H. Auden
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Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
W. H. Auden
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Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
W. H. Auden
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In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start.
W. H. Auden
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But he would have us most of all remember to be enthusiastic over the night. Not only for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer but also because it needs our love. For with sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow. They are exiles who long for a future that lies in our power.
W. H. Auden
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The closest modern equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot.
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
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Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.
W. H. Auden
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Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
W. H. Auden
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To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.
W. H. Auden
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Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
W. H. Auden
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Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.
W. H. Auden
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To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.
W. H. Auden
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History marched to the drums of a clear idea...
W. H. Auden
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A shilling life will give you all the facts.
W. H. Auden
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
W. H. Auden
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