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.

That which probably hears more stupidities than anything else in the world is a painting in a museum.

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

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

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.

Man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart.

O, beauty, are you not enough? / Why am I crying after love?

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.

A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case.

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.