Novels, the stages of a long inner journey...
The novelist is like a scout who has been entrusted with the mission of going to see what is going on in the depths of the soul. He returns and tells what he saw there. It never remains on the surface and dwells only in the most obscure regions.
The books he writes console the writer for everything that life denies him. A truly fulfilled life would probably be a sterile life for him. The satisfied man does not write.
Art is a serious activity, not a game, an activity that uses everything that is noblest in man, everything that brings him closer to the creative power.
A (plastic) revolution that started from an intellectual necessity and did not obtain popular support, is not complete.
What people was not first a poet, and then a thinker?
Between knowledge and art there seems to be the following difference: knowledge has as its object and investigates the causes of the truth it deals with, while art rather studies the way of acting the causes of the truth it deals with, while art rather studies the way of acting according to discovered or assumed truth. The philosopher or the artist therefore have a common subject, but their rules or principles and purpose are different.
Each generation of people seeks a new emotion: the same works are particularly reflected in the souls of those who contemplate them, for to understand a work of art is to create it in oneself anew.
A book is also a small profession of faith, as you choose it.
Scholars always seek to satisfy us, to answer our queries, while the poet delights us by the very question...
To find by reasoning or by experience, here is science; to feel or sense by the help of imagination is the highest poetry…
Science and especially philosophy will always remain poetic first through the feeling of the great things known, of the great open horizons, then through the presentiment of the greater things that remain unknown, of the infinite horizons that only allow us to glimpse their beginnings in a semi-obscurity... Moreover, the inspirations from science and philosophy are at the same time always old and always renewed...
There are things that man can only understand through art.
Fantasy is and remains the primary source of poetic creation. And whoever wants to understand the claim to truth of the poetic work in opposition to fantasy, would understand it wrongly.
Another question is whether the poet can convincingly express what he himself has not directly experienced. It was answered differently. Perhaps it cannot be given a general answer, since the gift of transposing and shaping from within foreign feeling is extraordinarily differently distributed...
This much at least can be said, that the poet with a rich sense of his own has access to a much wider human domain and has a much greater chance to model it convincingly, than the one with a limited life of his own.
The poem must open a piece of the world to the reader. Or even just a piece of human life because, ultimately, it is man's way of being, this, to live as a creature open to the world.
(The poet)... must not only bring to light the weaknesses and defects of human nature, but also recognize what is noble in it and bring it out of the dross.
In the work of art the artist disappears, but he does not speak and testify about himself, but about something else. From the perspective of the viewer, it can be expressed as follows: he contemplates the work of art, totally separating it from its creator. The work rejected the subjectivity of the creator; he left her behind, with her individuality, suffering and struggle - also with her effort and work...
The artist is given to intuit ideas and show others what he has intuited. Undoubtedly, not all intuited ideas (eg human ideals) become guidance for contemporaries; but there are always such ideas that acquire this role... This is most valid, without a doubt, about the poet. In the times when the higher ethos of a people begins to form, the poets - that is, the epic poets - are always the ones who place before their eyes the ideal image of man and the virtue, which is to determine him, with which he must it is measured and with which, in fact, it is measured. They are the true educators and shapers of whole successions of generations...
This thing is possible, because the creator enjoys in his intuition and creation a freedom that man otherwise does not know, not even in his ethos... This freedom, the aesthetic or artistic one, is something completely different from moral freedom. The latter is linked to imperatives (values) and can, in front of them, only decide for or against. Artistic freedom, on the other hand, can intuit values for the first time, and put them before others' eyes...
The real wonder of this freedom is the power to make the intuited idea appear concretely. The artist does not pronounce it as a moral, as a commandment, not even as an ideal. He depicts it, on the contrary, intuitively, in the lively character that he makes move and speak for himself, before the eyes of the viewer. And precisely by this, he achieves a convincing effect - pointing somewhat towards the dream human type.
Artistic production develops above all where great ideas move man and where the passion of the idea leads him to express himself.
The arts must not isolate themselves from real life, although they have their own kind of autonomy from it. This at least if they do not want to have to pay with their own lives... What they are according to their essence, they can only be within a historical reality, on the ground of which they are born... Precisely on this ground the task they set for themselves arises, which only they can solve, precisely because their creative reason is one of transposition into reality.
The relationship between art and morality which I denied, insofar as it is a matter of direct identification of art with morality, but which I must now affirm, noting the fact that, just as the poet retains his passion for art, freeing himself from any other form of passion, he preserves, in art, the consciousness of his duty (to art), and every poet, in the act of creation, is moral, because he fulfills a sacred duty...
Art without morals, art which receives from the decadents the usurped title of "pure beauty," and before which they burn incense gathered as before a diabolical idol—it results from the lack of morality in the life from which it is born and which surrounds it , decays as art and becomes caprice, debauchery and swindle; the artist no longer serves the art, but the art serves the artist as a lowly slave, for his personal and insignificant needs...
The artistic consciousness does not need to borrow from the moral consciousness the sense of modesty, for it carries it itself, as a modesty, a delicacy and an aesthetic chastity, and it knows when it is necessary to use no other form of expression than silence. On the contrary, when an artist violates this modesty, he violates his own aesthetic conscience and lets into his art what is not artistically motivated and, at the same time, morally culpable, for he betrays his duty as an artist, the closest and most urgent to him...
The artist must draw the elements of his art from the surplus of life and not from the surplus of an abstract generality.
The subject for art is... the human, meaning the depths and heights of the human soul, that which is universally human, with its joys and sorrows, its aspirations, deeds and destiny.
Poetry... marriage of reality with the ideal, in the soul of the poet.