By 'happiness' I do not mean worldly success or outside approval, though it would be priggish to deny that both these things are most agreeable. I mean the inner consciousness, the inner conviction that one is doing well the thing that one is best fitted to do by nature.

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

... all ugliness passes, and beauty endures, excepting of the skin.

I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.

When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.