Art... is a blossoming flower, which grows only in the land where law and morality, peace, tranquility and public security, culture and the sciences reign.
Art progresses only in a free society; despotism, stacking inhibits the development of art.
Science tends toward the general, art toward the exemplary.
Literature... is not tasked with describing what is, but what must be... Literature provides allegories. It reveals meanings. It is the interpretation of life.
Art is not an end in itself, but only a means to talk to people.
In any remarkable verse, of a true poet, there is twice and thrice as much as is said; it is the duty of the reader to fill in the rest, according to his ideas, according to his tastes.
When the job touches the art, it's one. But when art becomes a job, it's completely different.
A literature does not live by those who write, but by what they write.
Classic writers are contemporaries, always, but very rarely are contemporaries also classics.
Poets are the high priests of love. But they do not "serve." Officiate.
There is no minor art. They are only minor artists.
What will be able to replace the perishing religions in the intellectual and moral development of mankind? The answer to this question is: art.
More than once the observation has been made that the arts sweeten morals, that their practice and cultivation excludes cruelty in relationships between people, that is, excludes insociability.
Art cannot be imperative, nor didactic, nor proselytizing, nor pure pedagogy, unless it is no longer art, but moral...
Art is not art for art's sake, i.e. foreign to humanity, but, on the contrary, the more comprehensive the creation, the less it can be separated from the human and national land, and only for that reason does an artistic refinement also correspond to a moral one. ..
It is impossible to establish the autonomy of art, if it does not start from the concept of life as a whole.
The morality that really enters into art, not that into which art is thrown in, is a moral moment made aesthetic, usually called "taste." It is inherent in art, but it is not aesthetic judgment itself...
Taste is nothing but morality in art and as art taste is the morality of art.
The feeling that dominates all my books is that of the plurality of man, of the plurality of myself... My verses see my countless personalities that I have had, that is, that we have, that we are.
Maybe I didn't live my life, maybe I lived the life of others... a life interwoven from everyone's life: the multiple life of the poet.
The republic of letters is the only one that must be somehow imbued with something aristocratic, for the aristocracy of science and talent will never be challenged.
A writer's mission is to honestly analyze what he feels in the dire circumstances of life.
I regard art as the highest duty of life, as an essential metaphysical activity. Existence and the world find their eternal justification only as an aesthetic phenomenon.
The seductive hope of dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is a sovereign artist, is the premise of all visual arts, even of an important part of poetry.
Culture is above all the unity of the artistic style in all life manifestations of a people.
Of all the works I like only those written in blood: Write with your blood and you will know that blood means spirit.
The essential in art remains the perfection of existence, which is achieved by the production of perfection and what is fulfilled. Art is essentially affirmation, blessing, deification of existence.
Every art, every philosophy may be regarded as a remedy and as a means of stimulating the growth or degeneration of life: they always presuppose the existence of sufferings and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the fullness of life, who want a Dionysian art and at the same time a tragic look and perspective on life, and then those who suffer from an impoverishment of life and ask art and philosophy to rest, Quiet.
If there is so much pain in life, how much more should it appear in a literary genre which, in its highest form, is an honest transcription of life.
The better the writer's personal morals, the better his work.