AUDEN, W. H.

• Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.


• The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.


• No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.


• One cannot review a bad book without showing off.


• Small tyrants threatened by big,
  sincerely believe
  they love liberty.


• If there are any of you at the back who do not hear me, please do not raise your hands because I am also nearsighted.


• A verbal art like poetry is reflective. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.


• The shame of aging is not that Desire should fall : it is that someone else must be told.


• Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.


• Poetry makes nothing happen : it survives / In the valley of its saying.


• My face looks like a wedding cake that has been left out in the rain.


• A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.


• A situation in which the actor really suffers can only be found comic by children who see only the situation and are unaware of the suffering, as when a child laughs at a hunchback, or by human swine.


• It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in what direction to point that organ.


• Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.


• Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered.


• All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.


• Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.


• What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed food, forgotten and replaced by a new dish.


• Good taste is much more a matter of discrimination than of exclusion, and when good taste compelled to exclude, it is with regret, not with pleasure.