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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
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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
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More quotes by W. H. Auden

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We were put on this earth to make things.
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I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
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Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.
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Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
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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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Time will say nothing but I told you so.
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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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A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.
W. H. Auden
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The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden
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Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.
W. H. Auden
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Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
W. H. Auden
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A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.
W. H. Auden
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The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.
W. H. Auden
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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.
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Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
W. H. Auden
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Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
W. H. Auden
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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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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.
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Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams
W. H. Auden