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A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

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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Poet
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Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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More quotes by W. H. Auden

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Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
W. H. Auden
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. Auden
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The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden
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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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It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.
W. H. Auden
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The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
W. H. Auden
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There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.
W. H. Auden
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God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
W. H. Auden
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Learn from your dreams what you lack.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden
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There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.
W. H. Auden
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I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
W. H. Auden
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As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
W. H. Auden
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God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden
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Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden
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There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ''Did you get an erection?'' If the answer is ''Yes'' from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.
W. H. Auden
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Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
W. H. Auden