“And his own soul, being one of the loveliest as well as loftiest that ever passed across the stage of the world, transmuted the visible Universe to something after its own likeness.”

Suggesting that the artist transforms the visible world through the character of the self · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

• Art
• Beauty
• Nature

“Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention.”

Making sustained imaginative pleasure a central test of literature · Lives of the Poets, Dryden

• Art
• Beauty

“I do know that I have never observed the columns of the newspapers to groan so heavily under a pressure of orations.”

A characteristically comic complaint about excessive public speech-making · Speech, Manchester, 3 December 1858

• Art
• Humour

“It is sinuous as water or as light, flexible and penetrative, delicate and rapid; it works on its way without halt or jar or collapse.”

Describing ideal style as fluid, flexible and effortless · Essay, The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

• Art
• Beauty

“It is not a mere mechanical succession of beats and intervals.”

Distinguishing living rhythm from simple repetition or measurement. · Essay, The Flight of the Dragon (1911)

• Art
• Music

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

Stating Eliot's influential theory of impersonal poetry · Essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent

• Art
• Poetry

“Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.”

Giving culture its broadest value as a source of meaning in human life · Treatise, Notes towards the Definition of Culture

• Art
• Beauty
• Joy

“Follow the path of the ancients, seek what they sought, and then go beyond them.”

Widely attributed to Bashō, but translations and source attributions vary · Poetic teaching, as commonly translated

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death.”

A stark pairing of living image against a knowledge that kills vision · Inscriptions on the Laocoön plate

• Art
• Life
• Science

“The world’s verdict is, of course, of great financial value. The verdict of our fellow-craftsmen is a little nearer the facts of the case.”

Distinguishing commercial success from genuine artistic judgement. · Speech, The Claims of Art, 1907

• Art
• Criticism
• Success

“The poet shall go directly to the creation.”

Calling the poet away from unnecessary preliminaries and towards making · Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

• Art
• Poetry

“The corruption of a poet is the generation of a critic.”

A wry observation on how creative practice can turn into judgement of others · Essay of Dramatic Poesy

• Art
• Poetry

“Give him time and an active runner, a cock pheasant for choice, and he made magic again and again.”

Describing expert work as something close to enchantment · Book, Gun-Dogs (1931), Curly-coated Retriever chapter

• Art
• Nature

“Just principles with reference to the Fine Arts cannot, in my opinion, coexist with illiberal or erroneous notions upon general subjects.”

Connecting sound artistic judgement with intellectual openness · Essay, A Sixty-Drop Dose of Laudanum, Drop 2

• Art
• Truth

“All gardening is landscape-painting.”

Treating garden design as the artistic composition of living scenery · Conversation recorded by Joseph Spence

• Art
• Beauty
• Nature

“The sky is greater reading than the Bible, the sea than Shakespeare.”

Placing direct experience of nature beside the greatest books she knew · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1897–1907

• Art
• Faith
• Nature

“I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books.”

Recalling books as an imaginative refuge during a lonely childhood · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Art
• Childhood
• Solitude

“The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.”

Scripture is read as a grammar of making, not only of doctrine · Inscriptions on the Laocoön plate

• Art
• Literature
• Religion

“As the gold is said to be doubly and trebly refined which has seven times passed the furnace, so a fancy may be said to become more and more refined each time it passes through the human heart.”

Describing art as enriched by the emotional response of those who receive it · Speech, Liverpool, 10 April 1869

• Art
• Beauty

“I have written Ulysses to keep the critics busy for three hundred years.”

Expressing his ambition to create work that would sustain prolonged interpretation · Conversation, as reported by contemporaries

• Art
• Fame

“There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of appearing to have done everything by chance.”

Questioning writers who disguise labour and craft as effortless inspiration · Lives of the Poets, Congreve

• Art
• Truth

“Christopher Smart and Clare could write poetry from a mad-house — but who can write at all when suffering from influenza, say, or severe toothache?”

Uses literary history and humour to make a practical point about bodily suffering · Diary, 1932

• Art
• Mortality
• Poetry

“Books and plays exist because man is groping for a life beyond himself, for a beauty he needs, and is seeking to find.”

Seeing literature as humanity's search for beauty beyond ordinary existence · Essay, Why We Should Read Poetry

• Art
• Beauty
• Hope

“Scenes on the other hand presented with even a minimum of artistry will remain in the mind as long as life lasts.”

Artistic presentation can give experiences a permanence that ordinary information lacks · The English Novel

• Art
• Memory
• Writing