Arthur Symons Quotes

Sweet, can I sing you the song of your kisses? How soft is this one, how subtle this is, How fluttering swift as a bird's kiss that is, As a bird that taps at a leafy lattice; How this one clings and how that uncloses From bud to flower in the way of roses.

Hardly any one is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he criticizes before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.

He knew that the whole mystery of beauty can never be comprehended by the crowd, and that while clearness is a virtue of style, perfect explicitness is not a necessary virtue.

But we have been taught to see before our eyes have found out a way of seeing for themselves.

Here in a little lonely room I am master of earth and sea, And the planets come to me.

Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch twig for the castigation of offenders.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves... He must have the passion of a lover.

I had my dreams of Venice, but nothing that I had dreamed was as impossible as what I found.

A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.

My soul is like this cloudy, flaming opal ring.

And I would have, now love is over, An end to all, an end: I cannot, having been your lover Stoop to become your friend!

Art begins when a man wishes to immortalize the most vivid moment he has ever lived.

As perfume doth remain In the folds where it hath lain, So the thought of you, remaining Deeply folded in my brain, Will not leave me: all things leave me: You remain.

It is in their eyes that their magic resides.

Night, a more perfect day.

The making of one's life into art is, after all, the first duty and privilege of every man.

Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art.

The mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to the world.

A place has almost the shyness of a person, with strangers; and its secret is not to be surprised by a too direct interrogation.

There is not a dream which may not come true, if we have the energy which makes, or chooses, our own fate.... It is only the dreams of those light sleepers who dream faintly that do not come true.