“In this world things are beautiful only because they are not quite seen, or not perfectly understood. Poetry is precious chiefly because it suggests more than it declares.”

“Perfect love is the most beautiful of all frustrations because it is more than one can express.”

“If debates about beauty in nineteenth-centuryFrance were fierce, that was because beauty was seen to matter. Thiswas a world of political revolutions, of social reformism, of belief inprogress and human perfectibility. Why was it that beauty mattered somuch in such a world?.”

“There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.”

“Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious it is the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world.”

“Some things are more precious because they don't last long.”