Wystan Hugh Auden

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

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.

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

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.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.

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.

When one has great gifts, what answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise them

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

May it not be that, just as we have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that faith is even more difficult for Him than it is for us

Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.

To ask the hard question is simple.

As a rule it was the pleasure haters that became unjust.

All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.

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

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.