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A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.

— W. H. Auden Misattributed

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Source, in full

Attributed in Evan Esar and Nicolas Bentley, The Treasury of Humorous Quotations (1951). Auden was repeating an anonymous joke and did not claim to have originated it. See: Edward Mendelson, "Who Wrote Auden's Definition of a Professor?", audensociety.org (May 2013)

More quotes by W. H. Auden

To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

The Shield of Achilles (1955)

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

The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible, it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970)

Let us honor if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

Poems (1933)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: W. H. Auden (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.