“No interpretation can really give what the art itself alone can yield—its live, essential breath.”

Affirming that explanation can never replace direct encounter with a work of art. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Truth

“By such hints the imagination, being stimulated, and left to act on its own account, was roused to greater energy than by the display of forms in their completeness.”

Arguing that suggestion can awaken imagination more strongly than total explicitness. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Beauty

“Space therefore, empty space, becomes a positive factor, no longer something not filled and left over, but something exerting an attractive power to the eye.”

Treating emptiness as an active element of artistic composition. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Beauty

“The picture is not filled; it is waiting for our imagination to enter into it.”

Valuing the space a work leaves for the viewer's imagination. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Beauty

“The unsymmetrical, the imperfect, the incomplete has become the principle of design.”

Recognising expressive power in asymmetry, imperfection and incompleteness. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Beauty

“Memory naturally rejects what has not interested and impressed it.”

Observing that memory preserves what has genuinely engaged the mind. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Memory
• Truth

“There is indeed a deep fund of poetry in this attachment of man to the earth; in the immemorial associations which we have with the labours of the fields.”

Finding poetic depth in humanity's ancient relationship with the land. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Memory
• Nature
• Poetry

“We get a sense for particular beauties of nature, rather than a sense for Nature herself.”

Distinguishing isolated scenic pleasures from a deeper apprehension of nature as a whole. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Beauty
• Nature

“The contemplation of nature was no sentimental indulgence, but an invigorating discipline.”

Treating close attention to nature as a demanding form of inner renewal. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Nature
• Truth

“By passing out into the non-human world, the life of trees and flowers and animals, man could get rid of his devouring egoism, his belittling self-aggrandisement, realise his true place in the universe, and be braced thereby and fortified.”

Presenting attention to other forms of life as an antidote to self-importance. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Nature
• Truth

“One might say that man has been a monarch, looking to his subject-world only for service and for flattery, and just because of this lordly attitude he has failed to understand that subject-world, and, even more, has failed to understand himself.”

Criticising human arrogance towards nature as a barrier to self-knowledge. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Nature
• Truth

“The universe, in its wholeness and its freedom, has become his spiritual home.”

Imagining freedom as a profound belonging within the whole universe. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Faith
• Nature

“The winds of the air have become his desires, and the clouds his wandering thoughts; the mountain-peaks are his lonely aspirations, and the torrents his liberated energies.”

Describing the artist's inner life as fused with the energies of nature. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Nature
• Solitude

“To achieve a beautiful relation to another human being is to realise a part of perfection.”

Finding a form of perfection in harmonious human relationship. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Beauty
• Friendship

“A man is not an isolated being; it is by his relation to others and to the world around him that he is known and his nature made manifest.”

Seeing human identity as something revealed through relationship. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Friendship
• Nature
• Truth

“Beauty comes only from the relation of the features to each other and to the pervading character of the whole.”

Defining beauty through relationship and wholeness rather than isolated features. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Beauty
• Truth

“It is not essential that the subject-matter should represent or be like anything in nature; only it must be alive with a rhythmic vitality of its own.”

Arguing that vitality matters more in art than literal resemblance. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Nature

“The true artist, working when the mood was on him, was brought into direct relation with the creative power indwelling in the world.”

Portraying artistic creation as contact with a power larger than the individual. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Nature

“Perhaps no people has ever been stirred by a great idea till that idea was animated and made memorable by finding its right expression in rhythmical phrase.”

Linking the lasting power of ideas to memorable patterns of language. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Memory
• Poetry

“The power of rhythm is such that not only sounds and forms and colours, but the meanings associated with them become different, take on a new life.”

Describing rhythm as a force that transforms both form and meaning. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Music

“Not till the poet discovers his rhythm is he able to express his meaning.”

Making rhythm central to the poet's discovery of what can truly be said. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Music
• Poetry

“If we take a line of beautiful poetry and try to put the identical thought expressed into other words, or even transpose the actual words used, the life goes out of it.”

Arguing that poetic meaning cannot be separated from its exact verbal rhythm. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Poetry

“Whatever rhythm is, it is something intimately connected with life, perhaps the secret of life and its most perfect expression.”

Treating rhythm as something fundamental to vitality and expression. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Music
• Truth

“Art is not an adjunct to existence, a reduplication of the actual; it is a hint and a promise of that perfect rhythm, of that ideal life.”

Presenting art as a glimpse of a more harmonious way of being. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Hope