“In this endeavour to disengage the ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever exists, literature, bowed down by so many burdens, may at last attain liberty.”

His hope for literature freed from mere description of surfaces · The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899

• Art
• Truth

“Symbolism, as seen in the writers of our day, would have no value if it were not seen also, under one disguise or another, in every great imaginative writer.”

His insistence that symbolism is an old impulse, not a new invention · The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899

• Art
• Truth

“It is to call in a passing stranger and to say: Guard all my treasures while I sleep, for there is no certainty in the world beyond the certainty that I am I.”

On the vulnerability of entrusting one's happiness to another person · Critical essay on Keats, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry

• Love
• Truth

“One's nature no longer radiates freely from its own centre; the centre itself is shifted, is put outside one's self.”

Continuing his meditation on love as displacement of the self · Critical essay on Keats, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry

• Love

“Have you ever thought of the frightful thing it is to shift one's centre? That is what it is to love a woman.”

His striking image for love as a relocation of the self's whole gravity · Critical essay on Keats, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry

• Love

“It is the soul in them that sins, sorrowfully, without reluctance, inevitably. They have put off the common burdens of humanity.”

On the strange spiritual gravity beneath Beardsley's decadent figures · Critical essay on Aubrey Beardsley

• Art
• Faith

“Lear grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy mountain of trouble.”

His image for the way Lear's suffering fills and darkens the imagination · Critical essay comparing Shakespeare and Balzac

• Art

“In my endeavour to master the universal science of beauty, I owe more to you than to technical books or to technical people.”

A tender acknowledgment of his wife's instinctive feeling for beauty · Dedication to his wife, Studies in Seven Arts, 1906

• Beauty
• Love

“Literature is tied by that which gives it wings.”

A compact paradox on language as both burden and flight · Introduction, Studies in Prose and Verse

• Art
• Poetry

“Literature has to make use of words and facts; these words, these facts, are the common property of all the world.”

On the shared, unglamorous raw material every writer must transform · Introduction, Studies in Prose and Verse

• Art
• Truth

“The feast he spreads for us is a very Trimalchio's feast, the heaped profusion, the vaunting prodigality, which brings a surfeit.”

A witty complaint about excess dressed up as abundance · Critical essay on Francis Thompson

• Art
• Wit

“To him it was an identical act of the temperament to write the sonnets of the Vowels, and to trade in ivory and frankincense with the Arabs.”

On the single restless temperament behind Rimbaud's poetry and his later trading life · Critical essay on Arthur Rimbaud

• Art
• Truth

“The secret of Rimbaud, I think, is that his mind was not the mind of the artist, but of the man of action. He was a dreamer, but all his dreams were discoveries.”

His account of Rimbaud's restless genius as action rather than contemplation · Critical essay on Arthur Rimbaud

• Art

“Is there reason why one's love for a dog is so like what one's love may be for a woman, that they are so near a part of the earth, and so have a kind of wonder for us?”

Musing on the strange kinship between love for an animal and for a woman · Prose introduction to poems written after the death of his dog

• Love
• Memory

“Sometimes I say to myself, How great a burden of love is taken off my heart! It is horrible to have one's heart in an even balance.”

On the strange discomfort of a heart no longer weighed down by attachment · Prose introduction to poems written after the death of his dog

• Love
• Solitude

“I am always charmed to read beautiful poems about nature in the country. Only, personally, I prefer town to country.”

A frank admission of his urban, artificial sensibility · Preface, defence of Silhouettes

• Art
• Nature

“If you prefer your 'new-mown hay' in the hay-field, and I, it may be, in a scent-bottle, why may not my individual caprice be allowed to find expression as well as yours?”

Defending artificial beauty as no less valid a subject than the natural · Preface, defence of Silhouettes

• Art

“Whistler tricks life and the world into beauty by accepting in them only what suits his purpose, as indeed every artist must do.”

On selection as the artist's essential, unavoidable trick · Critical essay on the painting of G. F. Watts, 1900

• Art
• Beauty

“Nor do I affect to doubt that the creation of the supreme emotion is a higher form of art than the reflection of the most exquisite sensation.”

A concession that deep feeling in art outranks mere delicate impression · Preface, second edition of Silhouettes, 1896

• Art

“He does not realise, as the great novelists have realised, that stupidity can be pathetic, and that there is not a peasant in whom the soul has not its part.”

His insistence that even unremarkable lives hold something worth an artist's sympathy · Critical essay on Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

• Art
• Truth

“For nearly a year I have been normal, human, like other people, no longer isolated from the men and women whom I met in the street.”

An unusually tender admission of loneliness and its brief lifting · Prose introduction to poems written after the death of his dog

• Friendship
• Solitude

“I do not wish to assert that the kind of verse which happened to reflect certain moods of mine at a certain period of my life is the best kind of verse in itself.”

A rare moment of self-critical humility about his own early work · Preface, second edition of Silhouettes, 1896

• Art
• Truth

“The ideal of lyrical poetry is to be this passive, flawless medium for the deeper consciousness of things, the mysterious voice of that mystery which lies about us.”

His own credo for what lyric poetry should aspire to be · Critical essay on Verlaine's lyrics

• Music
• Poetry

“Unfortunately, words can convey facts; unfortunately, people in general have an ill-regulated but insatiable appetite for facts.”

His dry complaint about the reading public's hunger for mere fact over art · Introduction, Studies in Prose and Verse

• Art
• Truth