“Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another.… — W.H. Auden Copy Share Image
“Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence; Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part. They taught me to express my… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“As his wife, Emilia must know Iago better than anybody else. She does not know, any more than the others, that he is malevolent,… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive,… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“Human "nature" is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before.” — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“Cassio is a ladies’ man, that is to say, a man who feels most at home in feminine company where his looks and good… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“Our hunting fathers told the story Of the sadness of the creatures, Pitied the limits and the lack Set in their finished features; Saw… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
“Iago’s treatment of Othello conforms to Bacon’s definition of scientific enquiry as putting Nature to the Question. If a member of the audience were… — W.H. Auden Copy Share
