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Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
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 law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
W. H. Auden
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
W. H. Auden
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
W. H. Auden
Earth, receive an honored guest William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
W. H. Auden
Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.
W. H. Auden
The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.
W. H. Auden
The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
W. H. Auden
Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!
W. H. Auden
Hunger allows no choice.
W. H. Auden
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
W. H. Auden
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W. H. Auden
To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
W. H. Auden
Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
W. H. Auden
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
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
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
Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
W. H. Auden
Criticism should be a casual conversation.
W. H. Auden
Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
W. H. Auden
The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake.
W. H. Auden
