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Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

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
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Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
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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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The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
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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.
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In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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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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You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
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So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.
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All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: I refuse to be what I am.
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To save your world you asked this man to die would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
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I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
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But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer writer for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer poetry would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
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Now is the age of anxiety.
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Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.
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The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
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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.
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I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.
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No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
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