The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.