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You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
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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More quotes by W. H. Auden
The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
W. H. Auden
A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.
W. H. Auden
Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay If I could tell you I would let you know.
W. H. Auden
Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded.
W. H. Auden
But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer writer for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer poetry would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
W. H. Auden
There is no love There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
W. H. Auden
We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
W. H. Auden
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
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
Like love we don't know where or why Like love we cant compel or fly Like Love we often weep Like Love we seldom keep
W. H. Auden
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
W. H. Auden
Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
W. H. Auden
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
God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
W. H. Auden
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W. H. Auden
To make one, there must be two.
W. H. Auden
Poetry makes nothing happen.
W. H. Auden
Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.
W. H. Auden
Drama is based on the Mistake.
W. H. Auden
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
W. H. Auden
