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Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.

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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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Compassion
Return
Evil

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It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, What should I write at the age of sixty-four, but never, What should I write in 1940.
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The stars are not wanted now, put out every one Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun.
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Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
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As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality without art, no notion of liberty.
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It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is, rightly, more important that he eat than that he philosophize.
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Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
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Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.
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Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
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We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our natural attitude toward the other is one of either indifference or hostility.
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Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.
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Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
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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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To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
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Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
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Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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Learn from your dreams what you lack.
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I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women, preferably married ones.
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Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
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America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
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I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
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