Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.