WORK

'You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,

you only have to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.'

WH Auden in Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, p.87.  

MARRIAGE

'Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is more infinitely interesting than any romance, however passionate.'

WH Auden in Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, p.90.