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Sincerity is technique.
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
Sincerity
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More quotes by W. H. Auden
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
W. H. Auden
Drama is based on the Mistake.
W. H. Auden
A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.
W. H. Auden
You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
W. H. Auden
Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.
W. H. Auden
The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.
W. H. Auden
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W. H. Auden
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. Auden
I'm always amazed at the American practice of allowing one party to a homosexual act to remain passive--it's so undemocratic. Sexmust be mutual.
W. H. Auden
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
W. H. Auden
It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning... In life the loser's score is always zero.
W. H. Auden
If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.
W. H. Auden
Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
W. H. Auden
As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
W. H. Auden
An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.
W. H. Auden
Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.
W. H. Auden
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
W. H. Auden
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
W. H. Auden
