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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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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Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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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
Organic growth is a cyclical process it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.
W. H. Auden
Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.
W. H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
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
Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
W. H. Auden
The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.
W. H. Auden
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
W. H. Auden
A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going to smash They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods. A culture is no better than its woods.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
W. H. Auden
The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists
W. H. Auden
Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred without Science, we should always worship false gods.
W. H. Auden
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
W. H. Auden
The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
W. H. Auden
Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
W. H. Auden
Art is born of humiliation.
W. H. Auden
One can only blaspheme if one believes.
W. H. Auden
I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone says: 'Whom do you write for?' I reply: 'Do you read me?' If they say 'Yes,' I say, 'Do you like it?' If they say 'No,' then I say, 'I don't write for you.'
W. H. Auden
An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.
W. H. Auden
To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
W. H. Auden
