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As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
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
Duty
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More quotes by W. H. Auden
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
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When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.
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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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Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.
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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.
W. H. Auden
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
W. H. Auden
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
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An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.
W. H. Auden
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
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To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.
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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
Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
W. H. Auden
Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.
W. H. Auden
Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
W. H. Auden
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
W. H. Auden
Organic growth is a cyclical process it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.
W. H. Auden
We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock
W. H. Auden
I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
W. H. Auden
I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
W. H. Auden
