Mother's father and brothers all took great interest in pugilism, and they knew the game well from much practice of their own. They were never so much delighted as when I visited them with a black eye or a bloody nose, at which time they would be at the trouble to give cunning points as to how to meet an opponent according to his weight and height.


W. H. Davies

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Now is the age of anxiety.
W. H. AUDEN
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the ot...
W. H. AUDEN
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
W H AUDEN
It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in whi...
W. H. AUDEN
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
W. H. AUDEN
One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
W. H. AUDEN
A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.
W. H. AUDEN
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. AUDEN
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the m...
W. H. AUDEN
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
W. H. AUDEN
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
W. H. AUDEN
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. AUDEN
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as...
W. H. AUDEN
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology ...
W. H. AUDEN
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into ...
W. H. AUDEN
Know how sublime a thing is to suffer and be strong.
H. W. LONGFELLOW
You would attain to the divine perfection....
H. W. LONGFELLOW
Something attempted, something done, Has earned a nights repose.
H. W. LONGFELLOW
The worst bankruptcy in the world is the person who has lost his enthusiasm.
H. W. ARNOLD
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, ...
W. H. AUDEN
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
W. H. AUDEN
To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. AUDEN
No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. AUDEN
False enchantment can last a lifetime.
W. H. AUDEN
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. AUDEN
We are none of us infallible--not even the youngest of us.
W. H. THOMPSON
When the Sex War ended with the slaughter of the Grandmothers, / They found a bachelor's baby suffoc...
W. H. AUDEN
Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores
W. H. AUDEN
'Healing,'' Papa would tell me, ''is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
W. H. AUDEN
Embrace me, belly, like a bride.
W. H. AUDEN
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession
W. H. AUDEN
O for doors to be open and an invite with gilded edges / To dine with Lord Lobcock and Count Asthma.
W. H. AUDEN
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-Second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of ...
W. H. AUDEN
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction ...
W. H. AUDEN
The nightingales are sobbing in / The orchards of our mothers, / And hearts that we broke long ago /...
W. H. AUDEN
The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very dif...
W. H. AUDEN
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. AUDEN
If there are any of you at the back who do not hear me, please don't raise your hands because I am a...
W. H. AUDEN
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
W. H. AUDEN
Look, stranger, at this island now / The leaping light for your delight discovers.
W. H. AUDEN
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their conscience...
W. H. AUDEN
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in ...
W. H. AUDEN
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good
W. H. AUDEN
lay your faithless head upon my arm
W. H. AUDEN
Commemoration of John Wycliffe, Reformer, 1384 [John] Wycliffe's doctrine of "dominion founded i...
W. H. SUMMERS
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen
W. H. AUDEN
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain ...
W. H. AUDEN
Hunger allows no choice, To the citizens or the police; We must love one another or die
W. H. AUDEN
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator; but among those whom I love, I ...
W. H. AUDEN
Five minutes on even the nicest mountain / Is awfully long.
W. H. AUDEN
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the oth...
W. H. AUDEN
'In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away,And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day.
W. H. AUDEN
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy
W. H. AUDEN
A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scien...
W. H. AUDEN