W. H. Auden Quotes

When people don't understand what they're watching, a lot of what they perceive has to do with who they themselves are.

Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.

You see, it's never the environment; it's never the events of our lives, but the meaning we attach to the events - how we interpret them - that shapes who we are today and who we'll become tomorrow.

I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

I can’t be in charge of people’s perceptions.

A man hears only what he understands.

I think people always misjudge me.

It's not what you tell your players that counts. It's what they hear.

Between what I think, what I want to say, what I believe I say, what I say, what you want to hear, what you believe to hear, what you hear, what you want to understand, what you think you understand, what you understand...They are ten possibilities that we might have some problem communicating. But let's try anyway...

I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say.

We hear nothing so clearly as what comes out of silence.

Accidents are just from where you're looking; to the ego, it looks like it's miracles and accidents.

There is a difference between being listened to and being heard.

Being that can be understood is language.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

Hearing is listening to what is said. Listening is hearing what isn't said.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

I do know that we have delusions about ourselves in what we sound like.

Half the time you think your thinking you’re actually listening

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

I know what I have given you, I do not know what you have received.

It is the disposition of the thought that altered the nature of the thing.