It is 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. – W.H. Auden
Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable. – W.H. Auden
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish. – W.H. Auden
“Healing,” Papa would tell me, “is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.” – W.H. Auden
Enduring habits I hate…. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits. – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882