“The imaginative writer differs from the saint in that he identifies himself—to the neglect of his own soul, alas!—with the soul of the world.”

Contrasting the artist's immersion in worldly experience with the saint's pursuit of transcendence · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

• Art
• Faith
• Writing

“No mind is more valuable than the images it contains.”

Affirming the central importance of a mind's store of emotionally resonant images · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

• Imagery
• Imagination
• Mind

“All art is dream, and what the day is done with is dreaming ripe.”

Presenting art as the transformation of lived experience through dream and imagination · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

• Art
• Dreams
• Imagination

“The subject-matter of his meditation and invention is old, and he will disdain a too conscious originality in the arts.”

Preferring deep engagement with tradition to self-conscious novelty · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

• Art
• Originality
• Tradition

“Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating and delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions, with all the uncounted flavours of old experience.”

Describing cultivated emotion as something deepened by memory and accumulated human experience · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

• Emotion
• Experience
• Memory

“It is what is old and far off that stirs us the most deeply.”

Expressing Yeats's belief in the imaginative power of antiquity, legend and distance · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

• Emotion
• Imagination
• Tradition

“Drama is a means of expression, not a special subject matter.”

Defending the dramatist's freedom to draw upon any period, setting or subject · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

• Art
• Freedom
• Writing

“The test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.”

Locating poetry's ultimate test in felt delight rather than intellectual argument · Essay, Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times Was Made a Poet

• Emotion
• Love
• Poetry

“It may happen that poets will be made more often by their sins than by their virtues.”

Suggesting that artistic development may arise from imperfection and transgression rather than virtue · Essay, Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times Was Made a Poet

• Character
• Experience
• Poetry

“I am certain that every high thing was invented in this way, between sleeping and waking, as it were.”

Associating imaginative creation with the threshold between waking consciousness and dream · Essay, Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of Its Own

• Discovery
• Dreams
• Imagination

“He has felt something in the depth of his mind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful to our senses as possible.”

Describing artistic creation as giving sensory form to deep inward experience · Essay, Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of Its Own

• Art
• Imagination
• Mind

“There is something of an old wives’ tale in fine literature.”

Locating an element of ancient oral storytelling within enduring literature · Essay, Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of Its Own

• Literature
• Storytelling
• Tradition

“The lovers and fighters of old imaginative literature are more vivid experiences in the soul than anything but one’s own ruling passion.”

Arguing that great imaginative characters can become profound inner experiences · Essay, Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of Its Own

• Emotion
• Imagination
• Literature

“The novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a permanent form because having the power of psychological description it can follow the thought of a man.”

Identifying psychological interiority as one of the novel's distinctive strengths · Essay, The Play of Modern Manners

• Literature
• Mind
• Writing

“The common heart will always love better the tales that have something of an old wives’ tale.”

Affirming the enduring emotional appeal of traditional storytelling · Essay, The Praise of Old Wives’ Tales

• Humanity
• Literature
• Tradition

“Our deceit will give us style, mastery, that dignity, that lofty and severe quality Verlaine spoke of.”

Suggesting that artistic restraint and transformation create style rather than simple confession · Essay, The Tree of Life

• Art
• Skill
• Style

“We are only permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our complaints or our praise of that exacting mistress.”

Imagining life as the demanding source of both artistic praise and complaint · Essay, The Tree of Life

• Desire
• Life
• Writing

“I entered into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of love or bitterness.”

Describing authentic art as emerging from the need to release emotional burdens · Essay, The Tree of Life

• Art
• Emotion
• Love

“The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more did I follow the opposite of myself.”

Recognising the danger of pursuing beauty at the expense of authentic self-expression · Essay, The Tree of Life

• Art
• Beauty
• Identity

“I had not learned what sweetness, what rhythmic movement, there is in those who have become the joy that is themselves.”

Celebrating the grace of people whose outward life expresses an integrated inner self · Essay, The Tree of Life

• Character
• Identity
• Joy

“Is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most difficult of the arts?”

Treating beauty and enduring love alike as achievements requiring sustained effort · Essay, The Looking-glass

• Art
• Beauty
• Love

“A wise theatre might make a training in strong and beautiful life the fashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the looking-glass.”

Linking performance, self-awareness and disciplined cultivation of physical expression · Essay, The Looking-glass

• Art
• Beauty
• Discipline

“Music is the most impersonal of things and words the most personal, and that is why musicians do not like words.”

Wryly contrasting the abstract character of music with the personal nature of language · Essay, The Musician and the Orator

• Language
• Music
• Wit

“In literature, partly from the lack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have lost in personality, in our delight in the whole man.”

Lamenting literature's separation from embodied personality and spoken human experience · Essay, Personality and the Intellectual Essences

• Identity
• Language
• Literature