Arthur Symons Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Arthur Symons
The gray-green stretch of sandy grass,
Indefinitely desolate;
A sea of lead, a sky of slate;
Already autumn in the air, alas!
One stark monotony of stone,
The long hotel, acutely white,
Against the after-sunset light
Withers gray-green, and takes the grass's tone.

Arthur Symons
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!

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

Arthur Symons
I have laid sorrow to sleep;
Love sleeps.
She who oft made me weep
Now weeps.

Arthur Symons
They weave a slow andante as in sleep,
Scaled yellow, swampy black, plague-spotted white;
With blue and lidless eyes at watch they keep
A treachery of silence; infinite.

Arthur Symons
The gipsy tents are on the down,
The gipsy girls are here;
And it's O to be off and away from the town
With a gipsy for my dear!

Arthur Symons
My life is like a music-hall,
Where, in the impotence of rage,
Chained by enchantment to my stall,
I see myself upon the stage
Dance to amuse a music-hall.

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

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

Arthur Symons
There is not a dream which may not come true, if we have the energy which makes, or chooses, our own fate.... It is only the dreams of those light sleepers who dream faintly that do not come true.

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

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

Arthur Symons
The dead are happy, having no desire. I rise and fall, and rise and fall again, Something is in me, famishing for bread, Baffled and unappeasable as fire.

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

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

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

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

Arthur Symons
Hardly any one is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he criticizes before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.

Arthur Symons
Emmy's exquisite youth and her virginal air,
Eyes and teeth in the flash of a musical smile,
Come to me out of the past, and I see her there
As I saw her once for a while.

Arthur Symons
My soul is like this cloudy, flaming opal ring.

Arthur Symons
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.

Arthur Symons
I heard the sighing of the reeds
At noontide and at evening,
And some old dream I had forgotten
I seemed to be remembering.

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

Arthur Symons
O my child, who wronged you first, and began
First the dance of death that you dance so well?
Soul for soul: and I think the soul of a man
Shall answer for yours in hell.

Arthur Symons
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.

Arthur Symons
I have loved colours, and not flowers;
Their motion, not the swallows wings;
And wasted more than half my hours
Without the comradeship of things.

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

Arthur Symons
Sweet, can I sing you the song of your kisses?
How soft is this one, how subtle this is,
How fluttering swift as a bird's kiss that is,
As a bird that taps at a leafy lattice;
How this one clings and how that uncloses
From bud to flower in the way of roses.

Arthur Symons