Others

An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.

An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one’s way of taking a fact.

The people like neither the true nor the simple; they like novels and charlatans.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

When I can look Life in the eyes, / Grown calm and very coldly wise, / Life will have given me the Truth, / And taken in exchange—my youth.

Oh better than the minting / Of a gold-crowned king / Is the safe-kept memory / Of a lovely thing.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Judges commonly are elderly men, and are more likely to hate at sight any analysis to which they are not accustomed, and which disturbs repose of mind, than to fall in love with novelties.

Florence she found perfectly sweet, Naples a dream, but very whiffy. In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try' to be “consistent.”

Inventors and men of genius have almost always been regarded as fools at the beginning (and very often at the end) of their careers.

Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect.