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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
Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!
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No being can make another one happy.
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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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Good can imagine Evil but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.
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To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
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Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
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Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one
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The closest modern equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot.
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It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.
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To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith
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My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
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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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What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
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The poet who writes free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
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Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
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Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
W. H. Auden
There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow
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Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say
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Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.
W. H. Auden
