W. H. Auden Quotes About Character

Quotes about: Character

• A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.

  W. H. Auden

  Love, Character, Mean

• One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

  W. H. Auden

  Character, Thinking, Personality

• Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.

  W. H. Auden

  Song, Clever, Stupid

• Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

  W. H. Auden

  Book, Writing, Character

• Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

  W. H. Auden

  Character, Self, Two

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("Hic et Ille"), (p. 96), 1962.

• If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

  W. H. Auden

  Queens, Character, Home

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