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What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.

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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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Symbol
Named
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Escapes

More quotes by W. H. Auden

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Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead.
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Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.
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You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
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Those who hate to go to bed fear death those who hate to get up fear life.
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Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
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To save your world you asked this man to die would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. Auden
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All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. Auden
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The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden
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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
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There are three cardinal rules - don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.
W. H. Auden
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What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
W. H. Auden
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Learn from your dreams what you lack.
W. H. Auden
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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
W. H. Auden
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There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden
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We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.
W. H. Auden
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What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
W. H. Auden
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The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
W. H. Auden
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I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
W. H. Auden