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A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.

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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In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.
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By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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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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The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
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All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.
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To be free is often to be lonely.
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All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
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If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
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Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.
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To save your world you asked this man to die would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
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And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
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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.
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Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
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Hunger allows no choice.
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Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
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All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: I refuse to be what I am.
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Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.
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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.
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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.
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