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Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
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
Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.
W. H. Auden
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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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
To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
W. H. Auden
Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.
W. H. Auden
To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however good I may become, remains unchanged.
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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.
W. H. Auden
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
W. H. Auden
All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.
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Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.
W. H. Auden
The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.
W. H. Auden
Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.
W. H. Auden
In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or today.
W. H. Auden
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. Auden
You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
W. H. Auden
Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay If I could tell you I would let you know.
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I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade
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The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
W. H. Auden
Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.
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Why doesn't the United States take over the monarchy and unite with England? England does have important assets. Naturally the longer you wait, the more they will dwindle. At least you could use it for a summer resort instead of Maine.
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