The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.