Reflecții și Maxime vol. I.

Romanian literature asserts its existence not only through indisputable talents but also through specific and common characteristics. The artistic virtualities of race are evident in our popular poetry... Eminescu, Coșbuc, Creangă are not only outstanding talents but also points on the border of our soul map.

The literature of a people springs from the specific nature of its sensibility: it constitutes a chapter of ethical psychology.

It is a tendency of contemporary poetry to transpose reality into an unreal plane and to replace notation with equivalences...

Modern poetry has become a real algebraic problem, whose values ​​are signified by symbolic numbers; in order to be perceived and especially tasted, an initiation into the algebraic expression of sensations is also needed.

You wouldn't even imagine good literature that isn't national in some way...

All literary works are valued according to the degree of convergence of the national idea.

Art is, above all, the sign of man's power over chaos and death.

Contact with life and nature is only a first stage in the creation process, valid only to the extent of the initial disaggregation into elements that will then be combined into new compositions; everyone has contact, and those who live it sublimate it, less so. Art begins beyond him, from his sublimation; internal combustion and daydreaming distortion and personal vision in new planes - but above all, the continuity of spiritual life.

To be of a new generation, therefore, is not to be young - many of the young being old - but to participate actively in elaborating the subtlety of the age and fixing its style; to be from a new generation means to be contemporary with yourself, to be the exponent of the aesthetic aspirations of the historical moment and to realize them through a maximum of expression in works, caduceus, if we look at them in the context of true soul correspondences in continuous movement, but characteristic. If we look at them historically in the light of the evolutionary principle of the aesthetic concept.

The more national the art, the more it gains in universal significance.

The arts emerged from the beginnings of civilization, from the first contact with nature seen and with the invisible forces suspected behind it, from the spiritual and social rudiments: ecstasy, joy, exaltation, pain, the feeling of the divine, they gave the hymn, the dance, the music, - the elegy , drama, philosophy; social life with all its conflicts gave eloquence, epic, history.

A literature does not exist through scattered individuals but through a harmonious organization. The presence of a solitary genius proves nothing; the originality of a literature lies in its specific notes; distinguishing us from others, they constitute our own physiognomy...

Romanian literature is therefore not presented as an overlap of individualities, but as a sum, as an organic totality of ethnic characteristics, virtual in popular production and realized in cultured literature by artists of undoubted talent...

Far from stepping on the threshold of Europe with empty hands, we step not only with the possibilities of an original soul and as a background and as a form, but also with categorical affirmations, in solidarity with each other, but differentiated in the chromatics of universal literature.

Any creator leaves earned goods that over time lose their personal character to become independent values, available to anyone.

Dealing with the problems related to the man of our time is not an ethical or social imperative for the dramatic author, but a natural condition of creation. I do not see even a single great play in contemporary dramatic literature, which, in a more or less direct form, does not contain a sharp debate of the problems specific to modern man...

As for the partisan or objective attitude of the author towards the issues addressed, I must say that the dilemma seems false to me. She doesn't exist. The objective spectator attitude of the art creator is either an illusion or a hypocrisy. Because she is functionally anti-creative.

Oh, great and holy mission of poetry, you wrest everything from destiny and give immortality to perishing peoples.

Artistic truth is, like any truth, a historical one; its natural genesis is in convergence with the possibility of highlighting, of raising to the quality of being able to live, a moment in the development of humanity.

Only from a rich life can a true and rich art be born... This richness must not, of course, manifest itself unconditionally in an external mobility of life; it must exist alive in the experience of the world, it must form from the great subject of the just proportionality of subjectivity and objectivity - something substantial for the work to possess the substance absolutely necessary for its authenticity.

The real artistic totality of a work of art relies on the imagined totality of essential determinations. That is why they must rely on the intense experience of the social process. Only such an experience can reveal the essential social determinations, can bring them in a free and natural way within the framework of artistic creation...

The richness and variety of the great works of realist art is evident precisely in the fact that the intensive totality of the essential social determinations does not require either a pedantry of arrangement, nor a completeness of social phenomena, in fact it does not even tolerate them; rather, the most important social determinations must be entirely configured in the apparently accidental meeting of a few human destinies.

The true poet and writer must be visionary and clairvoyant, and the work of art must be prophetic and contribute to the illumination of life.

Behind every artistic activity lies the question: to what extent is this really a man's world, a world that he is able to approve as his own, appropriate to his human nature?

Authentic art, on the other hand, as a reflection of the essential, humanitarian-oriented moments of reality, must exceed the level of any particularity not only as a whole, but also in all details...

Even where an object seems to correspond in its hic et nunc exactly with what is reproduced, this correspondence is only appearance; indeed, accents, proportions, intercalations in wider and deeper connections, etc. Here, too, he creates forms of objectivity that decisively distance themselves from any particularity...

If any art is thus, in the most general possible sense, realistic, then there is nothing more radically varied than those means of expression, those systems of reference, etc., which allow the emergence of a realistic style corresponding to that historical moment.

All the formal demands of aesthetics... are nothing more than fulfillment conditions for the possibility of spontaneously experiencing this nostalgia, the deepest of humanity: to come to know oneself, to know one's own relationship with the external world and with himself through an active-creative self-reflection, corresponding to the truth, that is, to appropriate his own reality, his own essence as a copy, which has become an existence independent of him, of the world.

The identity between the Beautiful and the True is truly the immediate meaning of purely aesthetic experience and therefore an eternal theme of any meditation on art.

Art...the self-awareness of mankind's development.