Arthur Symons Quotes

Night, a more perfect day.

But we have been taught to see before our eyes have found out a way of seeing for themselves.

I have loved colours, and not flowers;Their motion, not the swallows wings;And wasted more than half my hoursWithout the comradeship of things.

The desert of virginity Aches in the hotness of her mouth.

Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch twig for the castigation of offenders.

I had had my dreams of Venice. But nothing that I had dreamed was as impossible as what I found.

The mystic too full of God to speak intelligibly to the world.

The wind is rising on the sea,The windy white foam-dancers leap;And the sea moans uneasily,And turns to sleep, and cannot sleep.

My soul is like this cloudy, flaming opal ring.

God, like all highest things, Hides light in shade, And in the night his visitings To sleep and dreams are clearliest made.

A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.

Art begins when a man wishes to immortalize the most vivid moment he has ever lived.

To have loved, to have been made happy thus, / What better fate has life in store for us?

Here in a little lonely room I am master of earth and sea, And the planets come to me.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Without charm there can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without fragrance.

Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears, A naked runner lost in a storm of spears.

And I would have, now love is over, An end to all, an end: I cannot, having been your lover Stoop to become your friend!

It is in their eyes that their magic resides.

The making of one's life into art is, after all, the first duty and privilege of every man.

There are certain natures to whom work is nothing, the act of work everything.

I have laid sorrow to sleep;Love sleeps.She who oft made me weepNow weeps.

Leave words to them whom words, not doings, move.

A place has almost a shyness of a person with strangers; its secret is not to be surprised by too direct interrogation.

The clamours of spring are the same old delicate noises, The earth renews its magical youth at a breath.

I heard the sighing of the reedsAt noontide and at evening,And some old dream I had forgottenI seemed to be remembering.

All art is a form of artifice.For in art there can be no prejudices.

The English mist is always at work like a subtle painter, and London is a vast canvas prepared for the mist to work on.

Love is a flaming heart, and its flames aspire / Till they cloud the soul in the smoke of a windy fire.

I would wash the dust of the world in a soft green flood. Here between sea and sea in a fairy wood, I have found a delicate wave-green solitude.