The true purpose of literature has always been to portray man, with his feelings and thoughts.
However little an author may be confident that he will one day address posterity, he must as much as is in his power always propose it to himself, and try to do things for its use.
The poet: ... one who expresses differently and better than the ordinary world, giving a feeling, an intense emotion, an intense expression; of a lofty idea, a lofty or sublime expression.
Men, finding in the impetuosity of high poetry a condition of exaltation, which they have not felt in their own existence but in dreams and fever, which have given them but a false copy of it, impute the state of dream and fever to the poet. The true poet daydreams. He is not possessed by his subject, but dominates it.
Our degradation lacks curiosity, literature brings a remedy. It reminds us that we have not done all there is to do when we have fulfilled our daily duties, when we have earned the necessities, and that the best and most specifically human part of us has not lived.
The intellectual beauty of the aesthetic conceptions of literature dulls and elevates again our atrophied intelligence reduced to the ways of everyday life. Literature captivates us by imitating our real actions, by realizing our dreams of action; its specific function, however, remains to pose those problems which life does not pose directly, such as the meaning of existence, the reason of the universe, the finality of human actions and universal evolution.
A novel, a poem are images of life, not its laws. They depict the reality of things, without constraining it; they are pure creations of the spirit.
The great literary personalities are, for the most part, images and symbols of collective life; foci that compete at certain moments with the rays emitted by the collective and send them back, then, variously combined and modified, to the collective.
The poem...: those who knew her don't talk about her and those who talk about her didn't know her
Reading:... unpunished vice.
Literature is the expression, the true thermometer of the state of civilization of a people... The word, spoken or written, is nothing but the representation of ideas, that is, of progress...
We want a literature that is the fruit of experience and history and therefore the beacon of the future, a literature full of core, analytical, philosophical, deep, that reflects on everything and says everything, in prose, in verse... o apostolic and propaganda literature, showing truths to those who want to know them by depicting man, not only as he should be, but also as he is, in order to know him; a literature, finally, which would be the expression of all the knowledge of the age, of the intellectual progress of the age.
Poetry must aim at practical truth.
Judgments about poetry have more value than poetry. They are the philosophy of poetry. Philosophy, thus understood, encompasses poetry. Poetry cannot do without philosophy. Philosophy will not be able to do without poetry.
Any artistic language is not only a manifestation of artistic individuality, but also the product of a certain time, a certain era, a certain social environment.
Art and science, long separated by the divergent efforts of intelligence, must tend to be closely united, if not to be confused. One was the primitive revelation of the ideal contained in external nature; the other was rational study and light exposure.
If Poetry is often an atonement, torment is always sacred.
Dramatic art is one of the most beautiful and glorious manifestations of human genius.
The universe being what it is, the only consolation we have is to imagine it in another form, and this is poetry itself.
Art belongs to the people. Through its deepest roots it must penetrate into the depths of the broad masses of working people. It must be understood by these masses and appreciated by them; to unite the feelings, thought and will of these masses, to raise them up.
If poetry touches on moral philosophy, then painting is at the center of the philosophy of nature; if the former describes the operations of the contemplative spirit, the latter operates with the spirit of movement.
A great writer, a true writer can only be born from a true man. For literature is thought. Accordingly, the writer must have ideas, and ideas are born of heart, intelligence, and civic consciousness. They are the result of a great love for your country, the result of the desire to give and not to receive. The writer is the man to whom millions of fellow citizens look with hope. A petty man has no business in true literature.
The purpose of art is not to reflect reality in the narrow mirror of a limited mastery, not in imitation, which is obviously poorer than the original and even more so in reproduction. The purpose of art is to penetrate the logic of the beautiful by studying its mechanism, in search of the simplest formula of its conception and existence, and therefore in the development of the initial idea.
What is the poet without pain? / What is the ocean without storms? / His life is a deliberate torment, / and worries are his friend. He buys celestial rumours, / gathers fame from nothing.
Art cannot exist without that vague and hard-to-define thing called personality.
A world without art is like a children's room from which gaiety has been banished.
All arts are meant to contribute to the ultimate art: the art of living.
Poetry:... The only means by which the gods speak to men.
There is no progress in art outside of originality, specificity and contemporaneity.
I believe in progress and in the self-victory of moral values against any dictatorial impositions; even if hangmen rise in the theater square, the literature of this country will not become imbeciles.