From the picture of dorian grey preface

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful are the cultivated. For those there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist materials for an art.

Vice and a virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

 

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. '

All art is quite useless.

William Butter Yeats

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

 I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

 Maybe at last, being but a broken man,

 I must be satisfied with my heart, although

 Winter and summer till old age began

 My circus animals were all on show,

 Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

 Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,

 First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

 Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

 Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

 Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

 That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

 But what cared I that set him on to ride,

 I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

 

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

 'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;

 She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,

 But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

 I thought my dear must her own soul destroy

 So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

 And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

 This dream itself had all my thought and love.

 

 

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

 Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

 Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said

 It was the dream itself enchanted me:

 Character isolated by a deed

 To engross the present and dominate memory.

 Players and painted stage took all my love,

 And not those things that they were emblems of.

 

III

 

Those masterful images because complete

 Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

 A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

 Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

 Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

 Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,

 I must lie down where all the ladders start

 In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

 

James Joyce

Ulysses

Characters

Leopold Bloom

Molly, his wife

Stephan Dedalus, a student