In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

Music is the art... which most completely realizes the artistic idea and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

It is absurd to say that there are neither ruins nor curiosities in America when they have their mothers and their manners.

What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.