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.

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say—your professional poets, I mean—there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

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.

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

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.”

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

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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

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

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.

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

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.