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Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

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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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Seldom
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Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
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Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred without Science, we should always worship false gods.
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Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
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Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
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Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.
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Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss
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Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
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A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.
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I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone says: 'Whom do you write for?' I reply: 'Do you read me?' If they say 'Yes,' I say, 'Do you like it?' If they say 'No,' then I say, 'I don't write for you.'
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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
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To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.
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Time will say nothing but I told you so.
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Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
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To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
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I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.
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Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
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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.
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Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
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Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
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