Bokelskere.no

Shakespeare is dangerous reading for talents in the process of formation: he forces them to reproduce him, and they imagine they are producing themselves.

Although Lord Byron's talent is wild and uncomfortable in its structure, hardly anyone can compare with him in natural truth and grandeur.

Now if he is not inclined to learn from more highly skilled contemporary or earlier artists what he himself lacks in order to be a true artist, he will lag behind his own potential because of a wrong-headed idea that he is safeguarding his own originality; for we own not just what we are born with, but also what we can acquire, and this is what we are.

Wer den Dichter will verstehen, muß in Dichters Lande gehen.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

All real and all half-poets make us so familiar with love that it would have become trivial had it not constantly and by its very nature renewed itself in full power and splendour.

Art is the conveyor of the inexpressible; it therefore looks like folly again to attempt conveying it by words. But our effort to do this enriches our understanding in many ways, and this, in turn, is good for our potential.

There is no way of more surely avoiding the world than by art, and it is by art that you form the surest link with it.

I'm sorry for people who make a great to-do about the transitory nature of things and get lost in meditations on earthly nothingness. Surely we are here precisely so as to turn what passes into something that endures; but this is only possible if you can appreciate both.

Hindus in the desert vow never to eat fish.