“Love appears to me, indeed, as the offer of heaven.”

From a long, unusually candid letter in which he set out his philosophy of love as a redemptive, almost sacred force rather than mere sentiment · Letter to Helen Snee, 22 May 1870

• Faith
• Love

“My artistic object is gained if, in them, I have kept strictly within the lines assigned to the sculptor’s art.”

Defining artistic success as fidelity to the formal discipline of sculpture · Written statement quoted in the preface to Songs of a Worker (1881)

• Art
• Beauty

“They are therefore essentially thoughts in marble, or poems of form, and it would therefore be unjustifiable to look in them for a sense which is not inherent in the purest Parian.”

Describing poetry as verbal sculpture whose meaning resides in form and beauty · Written statement quoted in the preface to Songs of a Worker (1881)

• Art
• Beauty
• Poetry