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

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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.”

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.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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

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

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.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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.

I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

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