If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.