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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.
W. H. Auden -
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
W. H. Auden
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You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
W. H. Auden -
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. Auden -
Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
W. H. Auden -
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden -
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.'
W. H. Auden -
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
W. H. Auden
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A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign.
W. H. Auden -
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.
W. H. Auden -
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
W. H. Auden -
In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.
W. H. Auden -
The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
W. H. Auden -
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden -
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.
W. H. Auden -
In the late Middle Ages there were, no doubt, many persons in monasteries and convents who had no business there and should have been out in the world earning an honest living, but today it may very well be that there are many persons trying to earn a living in the world and driven by failure into mental homes whose true home would be the cloister.
W. H. Auden -
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden -
The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
W. H. Auden -
Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden -
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
W. H. Auden -
The poet who writes 'free' verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
W. H. Auden -
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
W. H. Auden