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What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
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
Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ''shaggy dog'' stories they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.
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Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.
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In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
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August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.
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The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.
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A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.
W. H. Auden
Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
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Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
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Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond.
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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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Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last Nurses to their graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.
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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.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. Auden
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
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Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.
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For time is inches And the heart's changes, Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.
W. H. Auden
Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
W. H. Auden
Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
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The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists
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There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow
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