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When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

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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Life is a picnic on a precipice.
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Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
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In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
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You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
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Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.
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The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
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One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
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To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.
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Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.
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Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offence from luther untill noe that has driven a culture mad. From what occured at linz what huge imago made a psychopathic god. i and the public know what all schoolchildren learn those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
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Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
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I will love you forever swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday - Is that still as easy?
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If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
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No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
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Good can imagine Evil but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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All I have is a voice.
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Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
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Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
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As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.
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