Horace Walpole Quotes

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

One wouldn't want to say that what makes a good writer is the number of books that the writer wrote because you could write a whole number of bad books. Books that don't work, mediocre books, or there's a whole bunch of people in the pulp tradition who have done that. They just wrote... and actually they didn't write a whole bunch of books, they just wrote one book many times.

Don't you know that every perfect life would mean the end of art?

Most ballets are more interesting than most men.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

We don't call art filth or filth art.

Art's everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

Will you tell me, 'Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well'? Can he, indeed? ... Can you, sir? Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.

I like to play like that, with beauty and grace.

I look at the feminine body as a piece of art.

A book may be as great a thing as a battle.

Art is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.

Mere enthusiasm is the all in all... / Passion and expression are beauty itself.

Writing is not an end in itself but life transmuted into radiance.

Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

..Whoever dewlls on beauty tends to become beautiful; there will be a grace and charm to expressing itself through that person which no one can fail to recognize and appreciate.

An award does not change the quality of a book.

Expression alone can invest beauty with supreme and lasting command over the eye.

Life may as properly be called an art as any other.

In short, Beauty is everywhere. It is not that she is lacking to our eye, but our eyes which fail to perceive her. Beauty is character and expression. Well, there is nothing in nature which has more character than the human body. In its strength and its grace it evokes the most varied images. One moment it resembles a flower: the bending torso is the stalk; the breasts, the head, and the splendor of the hair answer to the blossoming of the corolla. The next moment it recalls the pliant creeper, or the proud and upright sapling.

And yet--it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires.

[Preface to second edition:] ... I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be.