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.

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 we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

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

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.