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The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
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
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
W. H. Auden
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
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There is no love There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
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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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Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
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In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
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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.
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What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.
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I'm always amazed at the American practice of allowing one party to a homosexual act to remain passive--it's so undemocratic. Sexmust be mutual.
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An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
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The sky is darkening like a stain Something is going to fall like rain And it won't be flowers
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A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
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We are all here on earth to help others.
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The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
W. H. Auden
What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
W. H. Auden
There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.
W. H. Auden
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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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
A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
W. H. Auden
