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We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is beyond me.
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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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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More quotes by W. H. Auden
Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.
W. H. Auden
To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
W. H. Auden
Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
W. H. Auden
And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
W. H. Auden
See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.
W. H. Auden
Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
W. H. Auden
Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.
W. H. Auden
Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.
W. H. Auden
Those who hate to go to bed fear death those who hate to get up fear life.
W. H. Auden
Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.
W. H. Auden
It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.
W. H. Auden
Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.
W. H. Auden
I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.
W. H. Auden
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
W. H. Auden
O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.
W. H. Auden
To make one, there must be two.
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
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
W. H. Auden
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
W. H. Auden
We who must die demand a miracle. How could the Eternal do a temporal act, The Infinite become a finite fact? Nothing can save us that is possible: We who must die demand a miracle.
W. H. Auden
