Knowledge may have its purposes, but guessing is always more fun than knowing.
That Auden bit is cited in the new and fun The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, by James Geary. While we are on the topic, here are Auden’s aphorisms on reading. Here are his aphorisms on writing. Here are the aphorisms Auden selected and edited into book form.
Geary also offers three aphorisms by Chateaubriand:
An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
As long as the heart preserves desire, the mind preserves illusion.
Love decreases when it ceases to increase.
I found this interesting: “To keep his errors down to a minimum, the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.”
What should an economist’s censorate consist of?
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