Confucius Quotes

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.

A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

All the arts of refinement have mutual kinship.

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.

Look at Bob Dylan: his voice is not a great sound, but it gets the idea across... and that is what's really important.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

Poetry is the breath of beauty.

Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

The charm of fine manners is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of these arts.

William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician.

What is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste?

Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

In a word, poetry can not exist without emotion, or, if you will, without a movement of the soul which regulates the words.

Good taste ruins certain true spiritual values: such as taste itself.

Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent.

I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed - it is, indeed, unavoidable.

The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.

Good taste" is a virtue of the keepers of museums. If you scorn bad taste, you will have neither painting nor dancing, neither palaces nor gardens.

How essential it is in youth to acquire some intellectual or artistic tastes, in order to furnish the mind, to be able to live inside a mind with attractive and interesting pictures on the walls.