“God help us -- for art is long, and life so short.”

“Dear me! how long is art!And short is our life!I often know amid the scholar's strifeA sinking feeling in my mind and heart.How difficult the means are to be foundBy which the primal sources may be breached;And long before the halfway point is reached,They bury a poor devil in the ground.”

“Medicine, and Law, and Philosophy -You've worked your way through every school,Even, God help you, Theology,And sweated at it like a fool.Why labour at it any more?You're no wiser now than you were before.You're Master of Arts, and Doctor too,And for ten years all you've been able to doIs lead your students a fearful danceThrough a maze of error and ignorance.And all this misery goes to showThere's nothing we can ever know.Oh yes you're brighter than all those relics,Professors and Doctors, scribblers and clerics,No doubts or scruples to trouble you,Defying hell, and the Devil too.But there's no joy in self-delusion;Your search for truth ends in confusion.Don't imagine your teaching will ever raiseThe minds of men or change their ways.And as for worldly wealth, you have none -What honour or glory have you won?A dog could stand this life no more.And so I've turned to magic lore;The spirit message of this art Some secret knowledge might impart.No longer shall I sweat to teach What always lay beyond my reach;I'll know what makes the world revolve,Its mysteries resolve,No more in empty words I'll deal -Creation's wellsprings I'll reveal!”

“So much simplicity with so much understanding — so mild, and yet so resolute — a mind so placid, and a life so active.”

“There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded disireable, that calls for art or for character”

“Your suns and worlds are not within my ken,I merely watch the plaguey state of men.The little god of earth remains the same queer spriteAs on the first day, or in primal light.His life would be less difficult, poor thing,Without your gift of heavenly glimmering;He calls it Reason, using light celestialJust to outdo the beasts in being bestial.To me he seems, with deference to Your Grace,One of those crickets, jumping round the place,Who takes his flying leaps, with legs so long,Then falls to grass and chants the same old song;But, not content with grasses to repose in,This one will hunt for muck to stick his nose in.”

“It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free ourselves from the desire to comprehend it.”