W. H. Auden Quotes
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What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
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One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
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To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however 'good' I may become, remains unchanged.
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Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.
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A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
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Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
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God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
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When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
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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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'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
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It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, 'What should I write at the age of sixty-four,' but never, 'What should I write in 1940.'
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Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign.
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In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
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Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
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It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
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I am beginning to lose patience With my personal relations. They are not deep And they are not cheap.
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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.