Florence Earle Coates quotes

I love, and the world is mine! (Florence Earle Coates)
Maeterlinck says that compared with ordinary truths mystic truths have strange privileges - they can neither age nor die. Beauty is eternal and ugliness, thank God, is ephemeral. Can there be any question as to which should attract the poet?
Florence Earle Coates
The question of perpetual copyright is, in my judgement, entitled to the full and favorable consideration of the Congress of an enlightened republic. There would seem to be every reason for the equitable protection, without limit as to time, of the unquestioned property rights of its citizens.
Florence Earle Coates
The business of art is to enlarge and correct the heart and to lift our ideals out of the ugly and the mean through love of the ideal...The business of art is to appeal to the soul.
Florence Earle Coates
The atmosphere of poetry today seems strained and unnatural. There is an attempt to force the growth of poetry.
Florence Earle Coates
Sculpture and painting are moments of life. Poetry is life itself.
Florence Earle Coates
They live indeed-the dead by whose example we are upward led.
Florence Earle Coates
Poetry belongs to the real things-to the realm of the ideal which is "the only real."
Florence Earle Coates
Ugliness in poetry they may find clever and interesting. But it is only beauty that "snatches the breath and fills the eyes with tears."
Florence Earle Coates
A democrat by conviction rather than by temperament, urging democracy as 'the only method consistent with human instinct toward expansion,' he was yet an educator, and believed in equality upon a high, not upon a low plane. Like Ruskin, he demanded of men their best, and with less than their best refused to be satisfied.
Florence Earle Coates
My "Poems" were written without a purpose, other than the expression of faiths and ideals strongly realized and emotions keenly felt. They were written for the joy of writing, and for the satisfaction of an irresistible impulse. It is my belief that it is not the business of art either to teach or to preach. (Florence Earle Coates)
In education poetry is invaluable; the study of it cultivates the memory, the imagination, and the heart.
Florence Earle Coates
poetry, which is the voice of the soul's aspirations, has for it, of all the arts, the most natural and immediate appeal.
Florence Earle Coates
poetry in some form is necessary to all-save, perhaps, to those who are content to live upon bread alone.
Florence Earle Coates
poetry needed no renascence. It was not young, it is not old.
Florence Earle Coates
There is no true poetry that is not dedicated to the soul and to joy.
Florence Earle Coates
there is a higher truth and a lower truth, and it is the higher truth that is the proper subject of poetry.
Florence Earle Coates
Existence has little repose, and the cultivation and love of poetry require a detached spirit and a certain amount of leisure.
Florence Earle Coates
Of all the arts poetry is the most intimate and personal.
Florence Earle Coates
The future of poetry should be, must be, in the hearts of children, lifting them above mean desires and helping them to believe, with Socrates, that they who have the fewest wants are nearest to the gods.
Florence Earle Coates
Many modern poets seem to think that poetry should be sensual. It should not-it should be sensuous. (Florence Earle Coates)
She was a great woman with the heart of a little child. Her works praise her; the millions of God's creatures whom she has saved from suffering sing her praise. Where she has gone the recognition of this world counts for little. She has gone where the merciful are blessed, where the pure in heart see God.
Florence Earle Coates