Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

 

The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.

 

Once my heart was captured, reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?

 

One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe.

 

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.

 

I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.

 

He who draws noble delights from the sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

 

Can one thus resume one's self? Can one know one's self? Is one ever somebody? I don't know anything about it any more. It now seems to me that one changes from day to day and that every few years one becomes a new being.

 

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.