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I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.
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
Civilization
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First
Make
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Think
Prerequisites
Thinking
Polite
Conversation
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A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.
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America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
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One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
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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.
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A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
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Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.
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Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
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The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
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Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
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The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.
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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.
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The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
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The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake.
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Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
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In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W. H. Auden
