Quotes via soulshelter.com

We are all condamnés as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve … We have an interval and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world,’ in art and song. … For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. –Walter Pater (1868)

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. --Oscar Wilde (1891)

The good [work of art] subsists and emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection. — Henry James (1884)

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. – Henry David Thoreau (1854)