To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.
It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.
To burn always with this hard gemlike flame. To maintain this ecstasy is success in life.
To burn always with this hard gemlike flame to maintain this ecstasy is success in life.
Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.
Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
With myself, how to pass time becomes sometimes the question – unavoidably, though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad in a life so short as ours.
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.