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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.
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
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More quotes by W. H. Auden
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.
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A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
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You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
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The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
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We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.
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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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The lights must never go out, The music must always play
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When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
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The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
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You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
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Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say
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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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The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
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Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.
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Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
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To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.
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If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
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Swans in the winter air A white perfection have
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Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
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We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
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