To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

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

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

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

Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.