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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.
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
Lying
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Organs
More quotes by W. H. Auden
Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last Nurses to their graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.
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Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.
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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.
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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
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We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
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Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.
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Harrow the house of the dead look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.
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All that we are not stares back at what we are.
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
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Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
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A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
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Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
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Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
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Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
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There are three cardinal rules - don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.
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As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
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We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our natural attitude toward the other is one of either indifference or hostility.
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Let all your thinks be thanks.
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When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
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Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
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