W. H. Auden Quotes
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To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
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Let us honour if we canThe vertical manThough we value noneBut the horizontal one.
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Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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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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The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good.
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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.
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August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.
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A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign.
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Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
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Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
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In all technologically 'advanced' countries, fashion has replaced tradition, so that involuntary membership in a society can no longer provide a feeling of community.
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I never write when I'm drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn't like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn't like slavish devotion - then she lies.
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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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No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
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He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
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The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
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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.
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Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
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It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
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Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last; Nurses to their graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.
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Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
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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.
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Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.