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Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Genealogy

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My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
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Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
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In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.
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The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages, what just reason could he give for refusing?
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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.
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Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them - the one, in fact, which is not a mask.
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See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.
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We were put on this earth to make things.
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Criticism should be a casual conversation.
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
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What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.
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Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.
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With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse
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As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.
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'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
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The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.
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In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning... In life the loser's score is always zero.
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Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.
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Alone, alone, about the dreadful wood / Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, / Dreading to find its Father.
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We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
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