“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“To see the world in a grain of sand is not merely a poet’s phrase, but the very secret of poetry.”

Often attributed to Symons in quotation collections, but the exact source requires verification · Essay on poetry, commonly attributed

• Nature
• Poetry
• Truth

“Symbolism, in literature, is the expression of the unseen by means of the visible.”

Defining art as a passage from visible forms to inward realities · Essay, The Symbolist Movement in Literature

• Art
• Truth