Reflecții și Maxime vol. I.

Art is soul ferment in eternal patterns, and this churning is all the more precious as it springs from a more complex and abundant consciousness.

The artist must conceive in pain, but must realize in joy, in the drunkenness of creating.

The artist can only tell his own vision of the world.

The purpose of the writer is to raise consciousness in the world through his writing.

The writer is a lighted lamp that illuminates the dark vaults where unjust blows take place, the hiding places where the brood of evil lurks.

The soul of a great writer is the soul synthesis of a people at a given time.

Poetry is not above the real, it is only an overcoming of the real, it starts from the real...

I do not conceive of art except as an expression of truth... therefore, art has the same object as the so-called moral sciences...

I think that literature must deal above all with soul values.

If we affirm that the literature of an age is correlated with the psychology of that age, and if we insist on showing that psychology itself is dependent on the philosophical explanation of the time, we return with even more justification to the claim that a literature must be structurally synchronic, to philosophy and her science.

The writer... is a man who expresses in writing with a preliminary sincerity, what he felt, what he thought, what happened in his life, to him and to those he met, or even to inanimate objects.

The consciousness of a people finds its expression in its art, and this expression, in turn, strengthens the consciousness, as gymnastics strengthens a body.

Literatures deepened more and more in the search for ethnic specificity, and their value in universality was valued precisely to the extent that they more clearly expressed the soul of a nation.

A literature is only valid when it is permeated by the aspirations of society and when it expresses them.

There is no literature, no art, without roots in the earth and in the occupations of men.

No genius has ever appeared out of nowhere, without ramified roots in the history of his people, without breathing the air of his age, without expressing in his creative work the tumult, the questions and the struggles of that age.

A literature is valued in universal literature, only through what it brings specifically national and autochthonous... We will deserve a place in universal literature only to the extent that we know how to remain Romanians as much and as intact as possible.

By practicing, or in contact with art, a state of soul disinterestedness is gradually created, which can serve as the basis of moral life, whose essence is the rejection of selfishness.

A literature cannot live alone, feeding only on itself. Literatures, from their beginnings, develop in close mutual dependence. Influences, infiltrations, correspondences of all kinds, in terms of form, spirit, motives, always stimulate the national background of a literature. I would even say that a literature is the more vigorous and durable the more influences it assimilates.

Only a strong and rich literature receives influences sympathetically, because it does not fear that they will overwhelm it and rob it of its originality.

Literature, like art, interpretatively mirrors life.

The function of art in general, and literary art in particular, is to extract from the ephemeral elements of duration by fixing them in forms that are precisely intended to ensure duration.

The writer is not only a witness of his time, his work is not only a string of documentary records of all kinds of facts with which he is contemporary... The writer has the duty, both to himself and to his readers, to -deeply develop the talent to nourish his vocation with culture and to discover in the present what can go beyond the present moment.

There is a poetic knowledge that leads to the discovery of aspects of Truth, which scientific knowledge does not always discover.

A true poet is always in the middle of life and not at its edge, contemplating from a distance the storms and earthquakes or, on the contrary, the calms and serenity. This attitude necessarily leads to a close proximity, to a deep fraternization with the outside world, with things and people.

Any literature carries within it the echo of the social circumstances in which it is produced.

The poet can be defined as the man who throughout his life preserves the ability to wonder, to wonder.

Romanticism, before being a literary movement, is a soul predisposition, a certain psychic conformation, a well-characterized attitude towards life and the World. Romanticism, viewed in this way, depicts one of the two great meanings of the human spirit, that of depth, on the path of dream and contemplation, in the inner world, in the world of psychic events, the other meaning being of the momentum, towards the outer world and corresponding, in the lines general, realism.

You can only create by fighting something. Even with yourself.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty: it is what instinct and brain can conceive beyond any canon.