Reflecții și Maxime vol. I.

The fact that man receives in artistic creation, without resistance, even enthusiastically, what he rejects in life, runs away from, feels disgust or fear, etc., constitutes the essence of aesthetic creation and its effect...

Poetry is at the same time discovery of the core of life and criticism of life. This dual nature of it can be emphasized with considerable energy.

The aesthetic reflection of reality, the truly artistic configuration is based - regardless of how the artist theoretically expresses his conception of the world - an essentially analogous image of the world, and of humanity... the aesthetic, by its essence, is not reality itself, but its reflection . Thus, the world acquires through the aesthetic reproduction of reality a unique emphasis.

An artist must have perfect technique, but above all, he must have advanced ideas and great nobility of character.

The poet who does not feel at the center of the universe is in error.

The worst thing for a poet is to shut himself up in the house with purity, with perfection, with eternity and with infinity. And art suffocates between superlatives. When you isolate them between four walls, these superlatives are barren muses; instead, to the one who walks through the world, through the ordinary world, they have a value of stars that illuminate the dawn.

In the matter of art, the starting point is passion... considered in its essential moment, the seemingly aesthetic sensation - and which is, so to speak, the seed of art - constitutes by itself, for the man of passion, its own justification. .. The artist is, by definition, a man of passion.

There are two ways of looking at the world around us: with cold, speculative or speculative reflection. And with a heart full of feelings. From the first way come science books for literature, from the second the works of art.

Art is serene, it must remain serene even when it expresses despair; and a despair that cannot be detached from dark thoughts is the sign of a great private unhappiness, but not the occasion for poetic conceptions...

Reading, thinking, writing are pure political acts.

Not the goal of reaching an individual benefit through writing; not the vanity of seeing yourself past among authors; it is not the ambition to outdo others, not these personal interests that give you the right of entry into literature. Only the impersonal enthusiasm for what you know to be true in your thinking, that alone puts the mark of the called on your forehead.

The poet is born, no doubt. But what is innate in the true poet is not the disposition for the empty form of rhythm and rhyme, but the boundless love of all that is human thought and feeling, so that from their accumulated perception the emotional idea may emerge to appear in the form the beautiful.

Poetry is a powerful and eternal game of mankind.

For me, the most perfect communication with a work of art involves integration into an era, explaining the threads of connection with a historical moment.

The word, above all, dream and song, finds its virtuality in the Poet, from the constitutive necessity of an art devoted to fictions.

I understood through a great sensitivity, the intimate correlation of poetry with the Universe, and for it to be pure, I conceived the project of taking it out of Dream and Hazard and juxtaposing it with the conception of the Universe.

Neither art nor culture are the adornments of beauty; they are fierce conquests of man to exalt, before the real world, a world that belongs only to man.

All art is man transcending his destiny.

Art seems to me a rectification of the world, a means of escaping the human condition... in its essentials, art is a humanization of the world.

Art is born not of a way of seeing the world, but of doing it.

What do we call an artist, creator or not?... Any person who NEEDS an art.

An artist is not necessarily more sensitive than an amateur and often less than a teenage girl; he is otherwise sensitive. Being Romanian does not mean being a novelist, preferring contemplation is not being a poet... a musician loves music and not nightingales, a poet loves lyrics and not sunsets... a painter is not, above all, a man who loves clips and landscapes; he is a man who loves paintings.

One of the meanings of the word art is to try to make people aware of the greatness that exists within them and which they ignore.

The greatest mystery is not that we are thrown between the depth of matter and that of the stars; but that, in this dungeon, we draw out of ourselves, images strong enough to deny our nothingness... All art is the struggle against destiny, against the consciousness of what carries the cosmos as indifferent to man and threatening; earth and death.

A great novelist must compete with life.

Art is born from the fascination of the imperceptible, from the refusal to copy performances; from the will to tear away the forms of the world which man endures in order to make them enter into that which he governs.

Art is not a religion. But the creative artist certainly obeys a vocation, which is not that of pleasing, and relates irresistibly in the definition that the dictionary gives to faith: "total adhesion of heart and mind".

The great artist establishes man's eternal identity with himself...

I believe in the eternal man because I believe in the eternity of the masterpiece... the eternity of those images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

"To understand a work" is as confusing an expression as "to understand a man." It is not about making a work intelligible, but about awakening the reader's sensitivity to what constitutes its value.