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I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
Composer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Playwright
Poet
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University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Evil
Learn
Done
Schoolchildren
Israel
Return
Learning
Public
Politics

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Earth, receive an honored guest William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
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Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.
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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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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.
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The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they've realised they can't get away with it.
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To be free is often to be lonely.
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I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
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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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In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
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The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.
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In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.
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It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
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Long ago the accusations had begun, And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged
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We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.
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Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
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Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.
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Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
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Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
W. H. Auden