Music, art and literature Quotes

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week.

As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.

I am fit for nothing but literature

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works

A thing of beauty is a joy forever; its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity - he is continually informing and filling some other body

Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain

The agitator seizes the world. The artist is seized by it

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer

Museums are the cemeteries of the arts

The trumpet does no more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing

The most accomplished monkey cannot draw a monkey, this only man can do; just as it is also only man who regards his ability to do this as a distinct merit