If a king loves music, there is little wrong in the land.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

I cannot live without books, but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.