W. H. Auden

No hero is mortal till he dies.

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.

Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

But once in a while the odd thing happens _x000D_ Once in a while the dream comes true _x000D_ And the whole pattern of life is altered _x000D_ Once in a while, the moon turns blue

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

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

Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.

Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.

We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.

Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams

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

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.

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

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

A small grove massacred to the last ash, _x000D_ _x000D_ An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: _x000D_ _x000D_ This great society is going to smash; _x000D_ _x000D_ They cannot fool us with how fast they go, _x000D_ _x000D_ How much they cost each other and the gods. _x000D_ _x000D_ A culture is no better than its woods.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough; Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.