To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike.

Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us.