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Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one
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
Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
W. H. Auden
To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
W. H. Auden
Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.
W. H. Auden
A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.
W. H. Auden
We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.
W. H. Auden
Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting he must also believe it to be true.
W. H. Auden
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. Auden
The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
W. H. Auden
A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
W. H. Auden
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
W. H. Auden
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
W. H. Auden
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W. H. Auden
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
W. H. Auden
There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.
W. H. Auden
Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.
W. H. Auden
Poetry makes nothing happen.
W. H. Auden
We are all here on earth to help others.
W. H. Auden
Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.
W. H. Auden
