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The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.
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
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
Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.
W. H. Auden
Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.
W. H. Auden
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
W. H. Auden
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. Auden
What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.
W. H. Auden
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
W. H. Auden
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
Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred without Science, we should always worship false gods.
W. H. Auden
The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
W. H. Auden
Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. Auden
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
W. H. Auden
Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
W. H. Auden
Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do it like some hidden assassin waiting to strike at you. Childless women get it, and men when they retire it as if there had to be some outlet for their foiled creative fire.
W. H. Auden
The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.
W. H. Auden
Long ago the accusations had begun, And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged
W. H. Auden
Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
W. H. Auden
The sky is darkening like a stain Something is going to fall like rain And it won't be flowers
W. H. Auden
There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.
W. H. Auden
It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, What should I write at the age of sixty-four, but never, What should I write in 1940.
W. H. Auden
