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Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.

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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My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
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Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
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Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.
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There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
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In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning... In life the loser's score is always zero.
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What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
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In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however good I may become, remains unchanged.
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I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
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Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
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Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.
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Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.
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Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
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The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
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The sky is darkening like a stain Something is going to fall like rain And it won't be flowers
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