Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

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.”

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

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

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

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.

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

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.

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