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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

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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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.
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To ask the hard question is simple.
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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.
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Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.
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Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
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The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.
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The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
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To be free is often to be lonely.
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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.
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
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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.
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There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
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The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
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It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.
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To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.
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Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.
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Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
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Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
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I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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