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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

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Experience
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Stimulus
Self
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Basic
Intelligence
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Doubt
Feeling

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The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
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Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
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Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
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Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
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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.
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A shilling life will give you all the facts.
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Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
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All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State and no one exists alone Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police We must love one another or die.
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the child unlucky in his little State, Some hearth where freedom is excluded, A hive whose honey is fear and worry, Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape
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All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
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Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
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I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
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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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The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.
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It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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Swans in the winter air A white perfection have
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The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
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There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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