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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
W. H. Auden
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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
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Essayist
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Literary Historian
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Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Taste
Differences
Opinion
Triviality
Friends
Irritated
Irritating
Corny
Proportion
More quotes by W. H. Auden
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
W. H. Auden
The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
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It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
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You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
W. H. Auden
The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
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Life is a picnic on a precipice.
W. H. Auden
The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
W. H. Auden
To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
W. H. Auden
If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.
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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
Good can imagine Evil but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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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.
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The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.
W. H. Auden
Drama is based on the Mistake.
W. H. Auden
Swans in the winter air A white perfection have
W. H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
W. H. Auden
A shilling life will give you all the facts.
W. H. Auden
Does God judge us by appearances? I Suspect that He does.
W. H. Auden
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
The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.
W. H. Auden
