Others

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we area nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

[ To a customs official upon arriving in New York in 1882 :] I have nothing to declare but my genius.

[ Reply when asked, as an Oxford undergraduate, why he was staring raptly at a pair of vases on his mantelpiece :] Oh, would that I could live up tomy blue china!

[ Reply when asked, as an Oxford undergraduate, why he was staring raptly at a pair of vases on his mantelpiece :] Oh, would that I could live up tomy blue china!

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence. . . . In the afternoon, I put it back again.

I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence. . . . In the afternoon, I put it back again.

I have put my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works.

I have put my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works.

California is an Italy without its art. There are subjects for the artist, but it is universally true that the only scenery which inspires utterance is that which man feels himself the master of. The mountains of California are so gigantic that they are not favorable to art or poetry. There are good poets in England but none in Switzerland. There the mountains are too high. Art cannot add to nature.

California is an Italy without its art. There are subjects for the artist, but it is universally true that the only scenery which inspires utterance is that which man feels himself the master of. The mountains of California are so gigantic that they are not favorable to art or poetry. There are good poets in England but none in Switzerland. There the mountains are too high. Art cannot add to nature.

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler’s ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

Poets, you know, are always ahead of science; all the great discoveries of science have been stated before in poetry.

Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

To recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of Wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in a balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imaginationof my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

Just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter-days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. . . . The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. . . . The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colors of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.