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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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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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Life is a picnic on a precipice.
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The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have Not universal love But to be loved alone.
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Water is the soul of the Earth.
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To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith
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A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting he must also believe it to be true.
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To save your world you asked this man to die would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water.
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It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
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Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred without Science, we should always worship false gods.
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Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
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Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
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Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
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Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offence from luther untill noe that has driven a culture mad. From what occured at linz what huge imago made a psychopathic god. i and the public know what all schoolchildren learn those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
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Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.
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A shilling life will give you all the facts.
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See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.
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The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
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Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.
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