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

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.

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

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

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

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.

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

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

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.

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.