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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.
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
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.
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Learn from your dreams what you lack.
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The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
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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.
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Look if you like, but you will have to leap.
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The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
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A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
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By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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Hunger allows no choice.
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In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start.
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Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.
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Love each other or perish.
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
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One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.
W. H. Auden
A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
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Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
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Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.
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And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
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Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
W. H. Auden
