“I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word.”

— George Moore (novelist)

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 12. <br class="br">Context: I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Shakespeare gives us the word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word, Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but Henry James, no; a hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them; they pass you in the street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they are dressed, you watch the colour of their eyes.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be t…" by George Moore (novelist)?

George Moore (novelist)33

Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoi… 1852–1933

Related quotes

“Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Source: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

“Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Address to the Democratic National Convention, Chicago, Illinois. (21 July 1952); published in Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952)

“The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

“"O father! I see a gleaming light.
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

St. 12.
The Wreck of the Hesperus (1842)

“The practice of politics in the East may be defined by one word: dissimulation.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Part 5, Chapter 10.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Contarini Fleming (1832)

“Entrepreneurs are artists and I mean “artists” in the true sense of the word: they see something no one else does.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Steve Blank in interview with Jake Cook, "Steve Blank: Lessons From 35 Years of Making Startups Fail Less" http://99u.com/articles/7256/steve-blank-lessons-from-35-years-of-making-startups-fail-less, U99 website, 2013.