W. H. Auden Quotes
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Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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The thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away, Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay At what the god had wrought To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Who would not live long.
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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 fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
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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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Art is born of humiliation.
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The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
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Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
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For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
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Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain's lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress.
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Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
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If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
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History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
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I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
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The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish.
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Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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To ask the hard question is simple, The simple act of the confused will.
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I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
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The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
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Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods.